Modeling the effects of alternative crop–livestock management scenarios on important ecosystem services for smallholder farming from a landscape perspective

Abstract

Smallholder farming systems in southern Africa are characterized by low-input management and integrated livestock and crop production. Low yields and dry-season feed shortages are common. To meet growing food demands, sustainable intensification (SI) of these systems is an important policy goal. While mixed crop–livestock farming may offer greater productivity, it implies trade-offs between feed supply, soil nutrient replenishment, soil carbon accumulation, and other ecosystem functions (ESFs) and ecosystem services (ESSs). Such settings require a detailed system understanding to assess the performance of prevalent management practices and identify potential SI strategies. Models can evaluate different management scenarios on extensive spatiotemporal scales and help identify suitable management strategies. Here, we linked the process-based models APSIM (Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator) for cropland and aDGVM2 (Adaptive Dynamic Global Vegetation Model) for rangeland to investigate the effects of (i) current management practices (minimum input crop–livestock agriculture), (ii) an SI scenario for crop production (with dry-season cropland grazing), and (iii) a scenario with separated rangeland and cropland management (livestock exclusion from cropland) in two representative villages of the Limpopo Province, South Africa, for the period from 2000 to 2010. We focused on the following ESFs and ESSs provided by cropland and rangeland: yield and feed provision, soil carbon storage, cropland leaf area index (LAI), and soil water. Village surveys informed the models of farming practices, livelihood conditions, and environmental circumstances. We found that modest SI measures (small fertilizer quantities, weeding, and crop rotation) led to moderate yield increases of between a factor of 1.2 and 1.6 and reduced soil carbon loss, but they sometimes caused increased growing-season water limitation effects. Thus, SI effects strongly varied between years. Dry-season crop residue grazing reduced feed deficits by approximately a factor of 2 compared with the rangeland-only scenario, but it could not fully compensate for the deficits during the dry-to-wet season transition. We expect that targeted deficit irrigation or measures to improve water retention and the soil water holding capacity may enhance SI efforts. Off-field residue feeding during the dry-to-wet season transition could further reduce feed deficits and decrease rangeland grazing pressure during the early growing season. We argue that integrative modeling frameworks are needed to evaluate landscape-level interactions between ecosystem components, evaluate the climate resilience of landscape-level ecosystem services, and identify effective mitigation and adaptation strategies.