Unravelling the physical, technological and economic factors driving the intensification trajectories of livestock systems

Over the past 100 years, the French livestock sector has experienced significant intensification that has occurred in different waysacross the country. Specifically, France has changed from a homogeneous state with most of the agricultural area covered bygrasslands and a uniform distribution of animals, to a heterogeneous state characterised by an uneven distribution of grasslands,livestock numbers and livestock species. Studying the dynamics of this change is fundamental to the identification of drivers thatshaped the various intensification trajectories and led to these different states, as well as to the prediction of future changes.Hence, the objective of this study was to characterise the trajectories undertaken by the French livestock sector to understand theintensification process and the role of socioeconomic, land use and production-related factors. A set of 10 indicators was employedto analyse the main changes between 1938 and 2010, using principal component analysis followed by a clustering of the88 French departments. Between 1938 and 2010, significant increases in farm size, mechanisation, labour productivity and thestocking rates of monogastrics enabled the French livestock sector to double its production. The most important changes involvedmechanisation (with the number of tractors per hectare (ha) rising from 0.0012 to 0.0053), labour productivity (improving from8.6 to 35.9 ha/worker), livestock production (e.g. milk production increasing from 758 to 1856 l/ha of fodder area) and stockingrates (rising from 0.57 to 0.98 livestock units (LU) per ha). The increased heterogeneity apparent in the patterns of changethroughout France’s departments was captured by clustering four trajectories. Two trajectories were formed by departments thatexperienced strong specialisation towards livestock production, with one type mainly orientated towards high-intensive dairy,poultry and pig landless production systems, and a second type orientated towards extensive beef grazing production systems.Another trajectory corresponded to departments that specialised in crop production with high labour productivity; mixedcrop-livestock systems were still maintained at the margins of this group of departments. The fourth trajectory corresponded to thelowest livestock population and productivity levels. The increase in mechanisation during the period was important but uniform,with no significant differences between the trajectories. This typology of intensification traj