Browsing by Subject "Grasslands"

Agriculture is known to have major environmental impacts through intense use of resources and occupation of land, and it is a significant contributor to climate change and biodiversity loss. Extensive agriculture, as High Nature Value (HNV) farming, benefits biodiversity while providing food and other ecosystem services (ESS). The environmental impacts of HNV ruminant production systems utilizing semi-natural grasslands (SNG) have until now been unknown for Finland and Estonia. SNGs are characterized by high biodiversity and a need for constant management. As livestock production, especially ruminant production, HNV farming on SNGs in the respective countries has potentially considerable environmental impacts whilst simultaneously supporting biodiversity through maintenance of the endangered SNGs. This thesis aims at quantifying and comparing the environmental parameters of global warming potential (GWP), land occupation (LO), and biodiversity, through life cycle assessment (LCA) of HNV livestock production systems in the two neighboring countries of Finland and Estonia and disentangling the drivers for the environmental parameters in both countries. In addition, a GWP for production output (meat) is quantified, and the environmental parameters are considered in relation to the production output of the farms. The results indicate that the HNV ruminant farming systems of Estonia are more extensive and self-sufficient to their production than their Finnish counterparts. Enteric fermentation drives the GWP on the farming system as well as on the product level, while the impact of imported inputs is observed in GWP and LO of Finnish HNV farms. Future research shall focus on determining the environmental impacts of water use and carbon sequestration, as well as the effect of HNV farming on below ground biodiversity. In addition, future research shall include animal welfare aspects to gain a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability of HNV ruminant farming systems.