Integrated Crop/Livestock Agriculture in the United States: A Review

Abstract

U.S. agriculture has become increasingly specialized over the last century with attendant benefits to food production and affordability. At the same time, specialized agricultural production has led to concerns for animal welfare, environmental degradation, and loss of biodiversity. An alternative to specialized agriculture is the integration of crops and livestock at the farm scale. Integrated crop/livestock agriculture could improve soil quality, increase yield, produce a diversity of foods, augment pollinator populations, aid pest management, and improve land use efficiency. Crop/livestock agriculture is not without challenges, however, as farmers must confront a history of specialization in agriculture along with loss of animal husbandry knowledge, erosion of genetic diversity, limited meat processing infrastructure, a regulatory framework more suited to specialization, and challenges inherent to animal agriculture.

Keywords:

• integrated agriculture
• crop/livestock
• animals
• pasture
• agroecology

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foremost, I would like to thank Steve Gliessman for his careful review and suggestions on several versions of this manuscript. I would also like to thank Erika Zavaleta, Margaret FitzSimmons, and Jim Hoey for their assistance in developing the themes in this paper. Thanks are due to the Gliessman lab for comments on early versions of the manuscript. Finally, a huge thank you to the two anonymous reviewers who made thoughtful and insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

1. The term “livestock” is used in this paper to refer to all domesticated animals raised for agricultural production purposes (i.e., poultry, cattle, sheep, etc. but not dogs, cats, and other pets).