How cows compete with human nutrition - assessing feed-food and land use competition of Swiss dairy production.

Ineichen Colantuoni, Sebastian Manuel; Reidy, Beat (2020). How cows compete with human nutrition - assessing feed-food and land use competition of Swiss dairy production. In: Meeting the future demands for grassland production. Grassland Science in Europe: Vol. 25 (pp. 608-610). Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers

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Ruminants are able to convert feed sources not directly usable by humans into valuable human-edible food. If, however, ruminants are fed with feedstuff that could have been consumed directly as food by humans (i.e. cereals), or which were produced on land that could be used to grow arable crops for direct human consumption, competition arises between feed production for ruminants and food production for humans. We developed and applied two different methods to assess feed-food and landuse competition on Swiss dairy farms. Depending on the amount and type of concentrate used, limited feed-food competition was found. All farms showed a larger edible output (in terms of milk and meat) than input (in terms of feedstuffs). Contrastingly, strong competition for land-use was found, as most farms (depending on the proportion of arable land) could have produced more edible energy and protein, if the land had been used instead for direct human food production.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences HAFL School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences HAFL > Agriculture School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences HAFL > Agriculture > Grasslands and Ruminant Production Systems
Name:	Ineichen Colantuoni, Sebastian Manuel0000-0002-8461-9825; Zumwald, Joséphine; Nemcek, Thomas and Reidy, Beat0000-0002-8619-0209
Subjects:	S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General) S Agriculture > SB Plant culture S Agriculture > SF Animal culture
ISBN:	978-952-326-944-6
Series:	Grassland Science in Europe
Publisher:	Wageningen Academic Publishers
Language:	English
Submitter:	Sebastian Manuel Ineichen Colantuoni
Date Deposited:	06 Jan 2021 16:36
Last Modified:	07 Jan 2022 21:46
Uncontrolled Keywords:	feed-food competition, land-use competition, by-products, dairy production
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.13346
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/13346