The global extent of farmland has peaked and is declining, according to this data visualisation from Our World in Data. The visualisation compares three different sets of data, which disagree on the total extent of agricultural land but which all agree that the peak occurred somewhere between 1990 and 2000. The decline in land use comes from pasture; croplands, on the other hand, are still expanding. In part, the decline in pasture extent is caused by a shift towards intensive grain-fed livestock rearing methods.

Maasai pastoralists are calling for international support to stop the Tanzanian government's plans to evict thousands of people from their ancestral lands in Ngorongoro and Loliondo to make way for tourism, development and wildlife hunting. In a public letter, Maasai community leaders argue that the Tanzanian government is falsely blaming livestock grazing and population growth for environmental degradation, to justify the mass evictions.

Research programme PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins) has produced this report, which argues that debates around livestock’s climate impacts are distorted by a focus on intensive production systems in rich countries. It argues that these debates ignore the millions of people who depend on relatively low-impact forms of extensive livestock production, and makes suggestions for how to include pastoralists in debates on the future of food.

This special issue of the journal Restoration Ecology examines trends, opportunities and research gaps in the restoration of grassland ecosystems. TABLE readers may be particularly interested in the special issue’s coverage of grazing and land-use legacies.

This paper, co-authored by Table member Georg Andersson, evaluates the trade-offs between greenhouse gas emissions, calorie output and biodiversity for several farm types in Sweden. It finds that while no one farm type maximises on-farm performance for all categories simultaneously, there is potential to manage the trade-offs, for example by reducing the land used for dairy farming in favour of both cropping for food production and extensive livestock grazing.

This paper presents a global analysis of the greenhouse gas balance of the world’s grasslands - both managed and natural - between 1750 and 2012, aiming to separate the direct effects of management by humans and the indirect effects of climate change. It finds that in most world regions, managed grasslands (those grazed by livestock or mown for grass forage) have a net warming effect on the climate, while sparsely grazed grasslands (natural grasslands not affected by livestock, but which may be grazed by wild animals) have a net cooling effect. 

This report has been produced by the Farming for 1.5°C independent enquiry on farming and climate change for Scotland. It sets out a pathway to net zero for Scottish farming, arguing that farmers and land managers will have to “revolutionise current practices” to reduce environmental harm and sequester carbon, and that multifunctional land use management (including agroecology, restored peatland, planted woodland and multispecies pastures) needs to become the norm.

This paper sets out the results of a Life Cycle Assessment of a multispecies pasture rotation (MSPR) system on the White Oak Pastures farm in Georgia, US. It compares the carbon footprint and land area for producing beef, pork and poultry via the MSPR to literature estimates of the impacts of producing the same meats through a “conventional, commodity (COM) production system”.