What place for livestock on a re-greening earth?
Abstract
Humanity is quickly encroaching upon the finite limits of the biosphere. As our numbers and appetites grow, food supplies become less secure, reserves of clean energy dwindle, pools of freshwater evaporate, the atmosphere's capacity to absorb our emissions diminishes and space for human and biotic habitat grows scarce. In response, some are now asking whether the biosphere can support our growing herds of domesticated livestock, notably ruminants. My aim in this review is to contemplate the place of these animals in a world in need of re-greening, in more ways than one. In addressing this objective, I advance the premise that the place of livestock is examined best from the vantage of ‘land’, broadly defined. Livestock have been implicated in many injurious processes: land use change, excess water use, nutrient excretion, fossil energy use, competition for food and emission of greenhouse gases. At the same time, they offer numerous benefits: producing food from human inedible sources, preserving ecosystem services, promoting perennials on croplands, recycling plant nutrients and providing social benefits. Thus livestock can be both stressors and benefactors to land and the aim of researchers should be to shift the net effect from stress to beneficence. To advance this goal, I offer seven questions, seen through the lenses of ‘systems’, ‘place’, ‘time’ and ‘community’, mostly to foster discourse. How do we better study whole systems? How do we better tune the systems to local…
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Many studies did not consider the potential for soil carbon sequestration in well-managed grasslands, and emissions from feedlot finishing might be underestimated due to a lacking representation of soil changes during feed production, such as soil erosion.
“However, as noted above, many of these studies did not consider the potential for soil C sequestration in well-managed grasslands, and emissions from feedlot finishing might be underestimated due to a lacking representation of soil changes during feed production, such as soil erosion”
From Impacts of soil carbon sequestration on life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in Midwestern USA beef finishing systems (2018) · cites this paper as Janzen, 2011
Cites
The interaction of TIGIT with PVR and PVRL2 inhibits human NK cell cytotoxicity
Stanietsky, N., Simic, H., Arapovic, J., Toporik, A., Levy, O., Novik, A., Levine, Z., Beiman, M., Dassa, L., Achdout, H., et al. (2009) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0903474106 · Cited by 3,524 · see citing works
The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature
Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007) · AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment · doi:10.1579/0044-7447(2007)36[614:taahno]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 3,487 · see citing works
Canadell, J. G., Le Quéré, C., Raupach, M. R., Field, C. B., Buitenhuis, E. T., Ciais, P., Conway, T. J., Gillett, N. P., Houghton, R. A., & Marland, G. (2007) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0702737104 · Cited by 2,136 · see citing works
Farming the planet: 1. Geographic distribution of global agricultural lands in the year 2000
Ramankutty, N., Evan, A. T., Monfreda, C., & Foley, J. A. (2008) · Global Biogeochemical Cycles · doi:10.1029/2007gb002952 · Cited by 1,942 · see citing works
Environment: The disappearing nutrient
Gilbert, N. (2009) · Nature · doi:10.1038/461716a · Cited by 817 · see citing works
Livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions: impacts and options for policy makers
Garnett, T. (2009) · Environmental Science & Policy · doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2009.01.006 · Cited by 569 · see citing works
Management effects on soil C storage on the Canadian prairies
Janzen, H. H., Campbell, C. A., Izaurralde, R. C., Ellert, B. H., Juma, N., McGill, W. B., & Zentner, R. P. (1998) · Soil and Tillage Research · doi:10.1016/s0167-1987(98)00105-6 · Cited by 411 · see citing works
Self-citationSustainable Development of the Agricultural Bio-Economy
Jordan, N., Boody, G., Broussard, W., Glover, J. D., Keeney, D., McCown, B. H., McIsaac, G., Muller, M., Murray, H., Neal, J., et al. (2007) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1141700 · Cited by 321 · see citing works
Environmental consequences of different beef production systems in the EU
Nguyen, T. L. T., Hermansen, J. E., & Mogensen, L. (2010) · Journal of Cleaner Production · doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2009.12.023 · Cited by 298 · see citing works
STEWART, A. A., LITTLE, S. M., OMINSKI, K. H., WITTENBERG, K. M., & JANZEN, H. H. (2009) · The Journal of Agricultural Science · doi:10.1017/s0021859609008764 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Stanley, P. L., Rowntree, J. E., Beede, D. K., DeLonge, M. S., & Hamm, M. W. (2018) · Agricultural Systems · doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2018.02.003 · Cited by 266 · see citing works
“However, as noted above, many of these studies did not consider the potential for soil C sequestration in well-managed grasslands, and emissions from feedlot finishing might be underestimated due to a lacking representation of soil changes during feed production, such as soil erosion (Janzen, 2011).”
BackgroundA landscape perspective on sustainability of agricultural systems
Dale, V. H., Kline, K. L., Kaffka, S. R., & Langeveld, J. W. A. (2013) · Landscape Ecology · doi:10.1007/s10980-012-9814-4 · Cited by 83 · see citing works
- Authors
- Janzen, H. H.
- Affiliations
- Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Janzen, H.H.
- Venue
- Animal Feed Science and Technology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2011-06
- Volume
- 166-167
- Pages
- 783-796
- ISSN
- 0377-8401 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1972772835
- Cited by
- 109
- References
- 10
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 13 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 9
- FWCI
- 7.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Animal Feed Science and Technology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Agriculture and Rural Development Research
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Land Use and Ecosystem Services
- Keywords
- livestock, ruminants, regreening, land use change, nutrient excretion, greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem services, perennial crops, nutrient cycling, water consumption, trade-offs, sustainable livestock systems
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
