Resilience and efficiency of a future-oriented agroecological dairy farm compared to low-input commercial dairy farms in France

There is an urgent need to identify dairy farms that are resilient to climate change and have high resource-use efficiency. This study assessed the resilience (standardised milk production and gross operating surplus) and efficiency (nitrogen-use efficiency and value creation) of the agroecological and experimental dairy farm OasYs compared to 22 low-input commercial dairy farms. The mean, slope and mean absolute residuals of a mixed linear regression of each indicator from 2017-2023 were used to calculate the indicator’s score for each farm. We ranked and clustered the farms by their scores and compared their farming practices. OasYs ranked among the highest for milk production (3 rd ), gross operating surplus (4 th ) and nitrogen-use efficiency (3 rd ) but lowest for value creation (14 th ). OasYs belonged to the most resilient and efficient cluster of farms even though it experienced more adverse weather conditions than the other 9 farms in the cluster with 16 summer days/yr whose maximum temperature exceeded 30°C against 6 days/yr on average for the other 9 farms, and lower mean effective rainfall (-186 mm) than the other 9 farms (6 mm). This was allowed by its (i) highly diversified land use with multiple forage crops (e.g. fodder beet) covering 26.9% of the area used to feed livestock against 1.2% on average in the other 9 farms, which helped buffer the variability in weather and extended the duration of the grazing season, and (ii) a more diversified herd thanks three unique practices not found in other farms i.e. three-way crossbreeding and two calving periods that helped balance fertility, health and milk production, and extended lactations that shortened each cow’s non-productive periods. The results provide empirical evidence that agroecological dairy-cattle farming can achieve both resilience and efficiency in the context of climate change.