Biodiversity in dairy system : challenges for a win-win partnership

Biodiversity plays an important role in a number of ecological processes highly relevant for food production. In most temperate areas, wild plant and animal species have co-evolved with agriculture. In the last 50 years, a shift occurred between agriculture and wildlife. The evolution of agriculture accelerated to speeds that biodiversity could not keep up with. We illustrate this shift with empirical evidence on agricultural intensification and biodiversity decline. Moving towards improvements requires indicators to monitor the state and trends of both agriculture and biodiversity. The effective benchmarking of farming and livestock systems requires a detailed understanding of agro-ecological processes. The development of indicators raises several problems related to metrics, functional units, time and spatial scales. Some indicators can be misleading and all indicators do not have equivalent properties in terms of accuracy, cost and communication towards decision-makers. We present different challenges for moving toward a win-win partnership between biodiversity and dairy systems. These challenges should account that biodiversity needs space, time and landscape complexity. Modulating the timing and intensity of management is an important action lever for enhancing biodiversity while ensuring acceptable levels of production. Recent theoretical and empirical evidences suggest that organizational innovations at landscape level can help to improve biodiversity by taking advantage of complementarities among different farms. We conjecture that it may be difficult to make a strict allocation of biodiversity loss to dairy systems because in agro-landscapes dairy systems are interacting with other farming systems and human activities. We finally conclude that win-win partnership cannot be achieved independently from other environmental issues.