Translations:Effects of climate change on livestock/15/en

Difficulties in feeding livestock

Climatic impacts on feed and forage

Overgrazed vs. stable pasture in Fall River County, South Dakota

Livestock is fed either by letting them directly graze forage from pasture, or by growing crops like corn or soybeans for fodder. Both are highly important; the majority of soybeans are grown for fodder, while a third of croplands worldwide are devoted to forage, which feeds around 1.5 billion cattle, 0.21 billion buffalo, 1.2 billion sheep and 1.02 billion goats. Insufficient supply or quality of either leads to a decrease in growth and reproductive efficiency in domestic animals, especially in conjunction with the other stressors, and at worst, may increase mortality due to starvation. This is a particularly acute issue when livestock herds are already of an unsustainable size. For instance, two-thirds of animal feed requirements in Iran come from its rangelands, which cover around 52% of its land area, yet only 10% have forage quality above "medium" or "poor". Consequently, Iranian rangelands support over twice their sustainable capacity, and this leads to mass mortality in poor years, such as when around 800,000 goats and sheep in Iran perished due to the severe 1999 − 2001 drought. This was then exceeded by millions of animal deaths during the 2007–2008 drought.