Nutrient Cycling and Environmental Footprints in Ruminants Systems: Productivity and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

This Issue is focused on the synergy between environmental assessment and precision agriculture, in particular, precision feeding, because it is desirable that the sustainability framework should involve precision technologies. Consolidated environmental impact assessment criteria, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), have successfully included innovative strategies to quantify the externalities. The scientific trend and, our goal, is aimed to verify, as a next step, a sustainability assessment of livestock systems, supported by precision technologies. Although dairy systems (mainly cattle) have shown up to now the larger improvement ensured by precision livestock farming (PLF), other ruminant-based systems show a growing involvement of PLF. The LCA, also based on an allocation criterion, turns out to be well modelled on multifactor enterprises and, moreover, deserves attention relative to systems that benefit from both innovative technologies and ecosystem services, as pastures.

Dr. Andrea Bragaglio
Dr. Elio Romano
Guest Editors

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