System wide evaluation of pasture based sheep production systems based on high resolution primary data

With the annual throughputs of 2.94 million cattle and 14.6 million sheep, UK ruminant farms and the associated sectors produce meat products worth £9.8 billion per year and their existence is widely considered to be indispensable for the maintenance of various ecosystem services and rural communities. In particular, pasture-based ruminant production systems utilise land unsuitable for arable crop production and therefore have the potential to contribute to global food security without initiating the food-feed competition for natural resources.

At the same time, ruminants are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, with 10 percent of human-induced carbon footprint attributable to their production around the world, and also a leading polluter of waterways. Given this economic-environmental trade-off, there is a clear and urgent need to identify strategies for improving the system-wide performance of the industry.

Recent research based on producer surveys has shown that the economic performance of UK livestock farms have a level of variability far beyond what can be explained by the geographical and biophysical conditions they operate in, and even more crucially, their economic performance is strongly correlated with environmental performance. This finding, combined with the estimated figure that more than 90% of global warming potential along the UK value chain for beef and lamb are attributable to on-farm activities, suggests that economic optimisation of ruminant production systems will not only benefit UK society economically but also environmentally.

Using the rich dataset and state-of-the-art facilities available at Rothamsted Research's North Wyke Farm Platform (NWFP: http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/farmplatform), this project provides the student with a unique opportunity to investigate options to enhance environmental performance of pasture-based ruminant production systems by the means of economic optimisation. While a stronger emphasis will be placed on sheep production systems (which have been shown to be environmentally less efficient than beef systems in the UK), strategies for optimal resource allocation between the beef and lamb sectors will also be explored as part of the research. Outputs from the project will be directly disseminated to the industry through the large network of commercial farms maintained by AHDB, the levy board for English agricultural producers who sponsors this research.