What can be suggested to design farms so that mutualism between animals and their plant partners may increase efficacy to enhance the sustainability of food production systems?
This is a common practice in conventional agriculture that is practiced by small farmers in India.
I would say that for herbivorous animals, the integration of pasture is a good way to reach a certain level of sustainability. If you develop grasslands in a good manner, you can store carbon (especially if the cattle effluent go directly in the soils), enhance biodiversity, potentially reduce GHG emissions. The matter is that it has to insure the cattle feeding resource also, to maintain a good level of productivity (in milk and meat). There exist many ways to develop grassland management skills and technics in order to reach a good level of productivity with pasture. Moreover, it can reduce the global costs for the breeder, compare to other aliments and breeding in buildings etc (effluent storage costs especially). By the way, pasture can be adopted partially, while keeping conventional sources of feeding also (silage forages, complementary aliments). Lots of things can be done
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