In-herd diversity of lifetime performances:a key for the sustainability of livestock farming system based on grassland

摘要

Sustainability of livestock farming systems ( LFS ) based on grassland depends on their abilities to buffer environmental variations while maintaining targeted production project.These abilities come from the regulating properties of LFS.On one side,regulations can arise from adaptive grazing management in order to take advantage of resource diversity under climatic hazard (Andrieu et al.,2007 ).On the other side,regulations can also arise from female adaptive abilities driven by farmer practices (Blanc et al.,2007).At the herd level,variable female responses generate a diversity of lifetime performances.The objective of this study was to assess the contribution of lifetime performance diversity to the sustainability of LFS based on grassland.We relied on the example of dairy goat herd.