HARNESSING BIODIVERSITY FOR HEALTHY DAIRY FARMS

Highlights

● Plant and soil biodiversity underline healthy dairy farms with less agrochemical inputs.

● Biodiversity-driven integrative approaches support healthy soils and high-quality milk products.

● Biodiversity-based modern farms can achieve high profitability with less environmental impacts.

Abstract

Producing sufficient high-quality forage to meet the increasing domestic demand for safe and nutritious milk products is one of the critical challenges that Chinese dairy farms are facing. The increased forage biomass production, mainly contributed by agrochemicals inputs in China, is accompanied by tremendous impacts on the ecology of dairy farms and soil quality. This paper presents a framework for healthy dairy farms in which targeted management practices are applied for quality milk products with minimal adverse environmental impacts. The paper also summarizes biodiversity management practices at the field and landscape scales toward lessening inputs of water, fertilizers, pesticides and mitigating soil compaction. Dairy farming with biodiversity-driven technologies and solutions will be more productive in producing quality milk and minimizing environmental damage.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

biodiversity / dairy farm / one health concept / soil health

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Program of Advanced Discipline Construction in Beijing (Agriculture Green Development), the Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (Plant–soil Interactions innovative research platform 1031-00100701), the Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Root traits drive microbial transformation and stabilization of root-derived carbon in soil affected by maize/peanut intercrop 32072676), and the Chinese Universities Scientific Fund (2021TC060).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Ruqiang Zhang, Zixi Han, Qiaofang Lu, Kang Wang, Yanjie Chen, Wen-Feng Cong, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. All applicable institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)