IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0053977.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Chicken Farming in Grassland Increases Environmental Sustainability and Economic Efficiency

Author

Listed:
  • Meizhen Liu
  • Bingxue Wang
  • Colin P Osborne
  • Gaoming Jiang

Abstract

Background: Grassland degradation caused by overgrazing poses a threat to both animal husbandry and environmental sustainability in most semi-arid areas especially north China. Although the Chinese Government has made huge efforts to restore degraded grasslands, a considerable attempt has unfortunately failed due to an inadequate consideration of economic benefits to local communities. Methodology/Principal Findings: A controlled field experiment was conducted to test our hypothesis that utilizing natural grasslands as both habitat and feed resources for chickens and replacing the traditional husbandry system with chicken farming would increase environmental sustainability and raise income. Aboveground plant biomass elevated from 25 g m−2 for grazing sheep to 84 g m−2 for chicken farming. In contrast to the fenced (unstocked) grassland, chicken farming did not significantly decrease aboveground plant biomass, but did increase the root biomass by 60% (p

Suggested Citation

  • Meizhen Liu & Bingxue Wang & Colin P Osborne & Gaoming Jiang, 2013. "Chicken Farming in Grassland Increases Environmental Sustainability and Economic Efficiency," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(1), pages 1-7, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0053977
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053977
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0053977
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0053977&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0053977?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bosshardt, Sara & Sabatier, Rodolphe & Dufils, Arnaud & Navarrete, Mireille, 2022. "Changing perspectives on chicken-pastured orchards for action: A review based on a heuristic model," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 196(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0053977. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.