* Minimising use of fossil fuels

Different factors influence the possibility of reducing the amount of fossil fuel used to feed dairy cows, an important requisite for agroecologically orientated farms:

• Local production, preferably from each farms’ own lands, which minimises energy costs in the transport of feed and forage supplements.
• Grazing, given that although the action itself implies using energy, this is renewable. Harvesting forage nowadays in the Basque Country implies using fossil energy and, thus the number of days during which cows are stabled should be minimised and number of days during which they graze maximised. Grazing also means that natural fertilisers (cow excrements) are spread without recourse to fossil fuels, which have to be used when slurry or manure have to transported from cow barns to fields or when mineral fertilisers are spread on grazing lands.

mowing grass

muck spreading


• Forage from native plants or those that have adapted to local conditions and which make best use of local resources (soil, water, etc) require less use of supplementary resources (such as fertilisers, the production, transport and spreading of which also represent energy costs) and thus have implications for solving the climate crisis.
• The production of forage without using synthetic chemicals saves the huge equivalent of fossil energy these represent.

Thus, those feeding regimes that rely heavily on imports of all types of feed and forage, particularly, for example, the importation of concentrates such as soy from other continents, are very costly in energy terms and contradict the philosophy of an agroecological approach to feeding dairy cows. In those cases in which it is not possible to produce all the fodder needed on a given farm due to difficult physical conditions such as climate, geomorphology or other reasons, either the herd size could be reduced or supplements bought in from the closest source possible in geographical terms.


* Maximising biodiversity

Another important function that feeding livestock should fulfil on agroecologically orientated farms is the maintenance and/or improvement of the natural and agro biodiversity on each farm. The floristic biodiversity of natural or semi-natural meadows and pasturelands or grazinglands that are only occasionally resown, increases over time until well over 100 different species from many botanical families are present. Not all such species are of interest in terms of livestock nutrition, some are actually poisonous, but they all contribute to the maintenance of habitats and the food chain that together maintain the fields themselves (different species of plants provide food and shelter to different organisms and animals such as insects, bird life and soil microfauna; for example plants such as dandelions and chickweed attract bees which are important for functions such as pollination) and other habitats in the surroundings.

Monocultures, even forage monocultures, drastically reduce biodiversity and the niches and habitats available to wild life with consequences for the stability and regular functioning of the different fields on a farm, the farm as a whole and surrounding lands.


Biodiverse rich meadow


Forage monoculture

* Soil conservation

When or where ever stocking rates are appropriate, maintaining the vegetation cover in fields and pasturelands helps conserve soils and avoids their erosion and transport. Of the rye-grasses, perennial rye-grass most resists trampling by animals, but there are other plant species that resist trampling on Vista Alegre farmland and so despite being of lower forage value, help maintain the vegetation cover in fields (for example the wild carrot Dauca carota or shepherd’s purse Capsella bursa-pastoris). A good balance needs to be reached between nutrition on the one hand and soil conservation on the other.

* Climate crisis
The are different ways in which agroecologically-orientated farming can help solve the climate crisis:
• reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions
• fixing carbon in soils
• reducing carbon release from soils
• carbon sequestration in soils

The following points should be borne in mind:

• All the ways by which agroecological livestock farming reduces use of fossil fuels (see above) constitute a direct contribution to fighting the climate crisis given that they reduce GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Once again, one of the key points is basing animal fodder on local resources: avoiding imported concentrates, balancing herd size and local/farm resources, and maximising use of local forage with an adequate protein content are all efficient means by which dairy farms can help solve the climate crisis.



Soy from Argentina: 10500 km

Dried alfalfa from Palencia: 250 km


Fresh grass and clover fodder from the farm:
100m – 2km


Cows grazing farm pastureland: 0km



- The de-intensification of stocking rates that results from substitution of intensive dairy farms by those based on grazing implies lower and more diffuse emissions of GHG such as methane (CH4). In a best-case scenario, in which a balance is reached between stocking rates and meadow and grassland management without recourse to the use of mineral fertilisers or feed-forage supplements, the advantages gained due to the amount of carbon sequestered amply outdo the disadvantages of any CH4 and N2O (nitric oxide) emissions from livestock.

- Maintenance of the vegetation cover in fields due to correct stocking rates and field management also helps in the sequestration and fixing of carbon, and prevents carbon release due to ploughing up fields for cultivation (ploughing soils accelerates the decomposition of organic matter, including oxidation of carbon to CO2 as soils become warmer, as clods of earth are broken up or as waste matter from the soil surface is introduced to more humid layers of the soil) or by maintaining a stocking rate that does not surpass the capacity of vegetation to maintain itself, for example. Perennial grass species such as perennial rye-grass are of great interest from this point of view.

Index