Organic Fodder Production in Intensive Organic Livestock Production in Europe: Recent Scientific Findings and the Impact on the Development of Organic Farming

Summary

Organic farming is practiced in over 100 countries on more than 26 million hectares. In the European Union (EU 25), about 5.6 million hectares of farm land are certified under the EU organic farming regulation 2092/91/EEC. Since 1992, these figures have been increased six times. The 160,000 organic farms in the EU 25 keep about 1.5 million cattle, 1.6 million sheep, 0.55 million pigs and 17.3 million chickens. Two different intensities can be identified: extensive and intensive organic animal husbandry. Extensive animal husbandry is mostly found on low productive and remote areas and carried out with beef cattle, sheep and goats. These systems cope easily with the organic farming standards. Intensive organic animal husbandry is found in more productive areas and done with dairy animals, pigs and chickens. High performance of production demands high quality feedstuff. For these farms, balanced diets are the major difficulty under the organic farming standards. The EU Commission decided that organic husbandry systems must have 100% organic diets by 2011, at that time conventional feedstuffs will be abandoned. This is a challenge for the development of intensive organic animal husbandry systems.
In the last years, a lot of research has been carried out to solve the problems of optimised feeding rations for intensive organic animal husbandry. Nevertheless, most of them are preliminary and not all problems have been solved. This paper will present some recent scientific findings in fodder production for intensive organic animal husbandry in Europe: high protein quality, roughage quality, feedstuff processing and “healthy feed. ” The future demands for research and extension (R&D, M&E) will be derived in the conclusions.