Beef production in the Canadian Prairies: Prospects of feed availability under climate and land use change

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The beef industry is of strategic importance for the Canadian economy, contributing $18 billion annually to the Canadian gross domestic product, and generating 228,000 jobs nationally. To achieve this impressive economic performance, the Canadian beef industry relies on a production system mostly concentrated in the prairie provinces that includes grasslands as its major feed source. As the global demand for livestock products continues to rise, the Canadian beef industry will need more grassland areas in order to increase production to meet this demand. However, an increased feed availability from grasslands in Canada is uncertain due to land use and climate changes. The proposed program aims at assessing current and future feed availability from grasslands for beef production in the Canadian Prairies, taking into consideration the interaction amongst environment, climate, land use, and management practices. The program will also propose strategies to improve grassland productivity and promote the sustainability of the beef industry through a combination of field monitoring and computer modelling approaches. Grassland coverage and biomass productivity maps will be generated from 20-m resolution satellite imagery coupled with targeted biomass sampling. These maps will be used to calibrate the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model, which will be used to simulate biomass productivity under current and future land use and climate conditions. Novel aspects of this program include the consideration given to management practices that can potentially increase the economic return of grasslands by increasing biomass productivity and the impact of government programs aimed at increasing animal protein production, such as Manitoba Protein Advantage Strategy. The outcomes of this program will advance scientific knowledge on the productivity of grassland systems at a regional scale, reveal important interactions among grassland dynamics and its vulnerability to climate and land use change, and quantify the impact of physiographic (i.e., agricultural soil suitability), economic (i.e., commodity prices), and policy (i.e., government programs) drivers on feed availability. This research will also support science--based policy development, as it integrates the agronomic and environmental perspectives at the regional scale. Finally, this research will support risk assessments of the beef industry, which is an important agricultural commodity in Canada and for which grasslands represent a critical component of the production system. This program will also promote training of graduate and undergraduate students in cutting--edge modelling methods, big data processing and integration techniques, and analysis of complex issues at regional scales. Such a skill set is highly desirable for both academic and non--academic career paths, as we move into a science--based paradigm where critical thinking and analytical skills are crucial.