A New Long-Term Experiment to Evaluate and Demonstrate Agricultural Sustainability at Lövsta Field Research Station

Sammanfattning

Agricultural sustainability is a wide-ranging concept which is receiving increasing attention amid the myriad, deepening challenges created by increasingly intensive food production systems. One symptom of this increasing intensification is the homogeneity of agricultural regions, which are becoming ever more specialised for production of one, or at least few, specific commodities, to the detriment of landscape-scale diversity and its many associated benefits to an agroecosystem. Faced with this challenge, there is a need for long-term, landscape-scale experiments, integrating both livestock and arable agriculture into a single food production system. The approaches entailed in such experiments must be assessed holistically, with equal consideration to diverse agronomic, ecological, and socioeconomic aspects of sustainability, in consultation with experts in each of these fields. This is a perspective which has often been emphasised, but rarely executed in long-term, realworld experimentation. It is moreover essential that the approaches used in such an experiment, and their value for sustainability, are easily available for demonstration and co-creation with end-users, given their role in bringing them to widespread application. We therefore considered the need for such an experiment, and how best to design it for both the evaluation of overall system sustainability, and the creation of infrastructure required for a long-term demonstration platform at SLU’s primary field site in Lövsta. We then undertook a series of workshops and meetings with experts in specific aspects of agricultural sustainability, as well as technical staff at Lövsta, to inform the design of a long-term experiment which best integrates all major aspects of agricultural sustainability. In this report we document the priorities described through these discussions, before concluding with our system design and recommendations for baseline metrics to be measured prior to the start of the experiment. In this way, we create a long-term experiment sufficiently holistic to assess agricultural sustainability as we currently understand it, while also being sufficiently flexible to be easily modified to reflect changing priorities of future research.

Nyckelord

Agroecology; Grazing; Landscape; Multi-Discipline; Rotation; Tillage

Publicerad i

Mistra Food Futures Report
2024, nummer: 24
Utgivare: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU författare

• Hickman, Darwin

  • Institutionen för växtproduktionsekologi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Dahlin, Sigrun

  • Institutionen för växtproduktionsekologi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Bergkvist, Göran

  • Institutionen för växtproduktionsekologi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Owusu Sekyere, Enoch

  • Institutionen för ekonomi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Danielsson, Rebecca

  • Institutionen för tillämpad husdjursvetenskap och välfärd, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

UKÄ forskningsämne

Jordbruksvetenskap
Tvärvetenskapliga studier

Publikationens identifierare

• ISBN: 978-91-8046-668-4
• eISBN: 978-91-8046-568-7

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/139590