Michel Meuret

Our landscapes, our livestock, ourselves: Restoring broken linkages among plants, herbivores, and humans with diets that nourish and satiate

We contend that palates link herbivores and humans with landscapes and consider how these relationships have changed historically. An attuned palate, which enables herbivores to meet needs for nutrients and self-medicate to rectify maladies, evolves from three interrelated processes: flavor-feedback associations, availability of phytochemically rich foods, and learning in utero and early in life to eat nourishing combinations of foods. That occurs when wild or domestic herbivores forage on phytochemically rich landscapes, is less common when domestic herbivores forage on monoculture pastures, is close to zero for herbivores in feedlots, and is increasingly rare for people who forage in modern food outlets. Unlike our ancestors, the palates of many individuals are no longer linked in healthy ways with landscapes. Industrial farming and selection for yield, appearance, and transportability diminished the flavor, phytochemical richness, and nutritive value of fruits and vegetables for humans. Phytochemically impoverished pastures and feedlot diets can adversely affect the health of livestock and the flavor and nutritive value of meat and milk products for humans. While flavors of produce, meat, and dairy have become blander, processed foods have become more desirable as people have learned to link synthetic flavors with feedback from energy-rich compounds that obscure nutritional sameness and diminish health. Thus, the roles plants and animals once played in nutrition have been usurped by processed foods that are altered, fortified, and enriched in ways that can adversely affect appetitive states and food preferences. The need to amend foods, and to take nutrient supplements, could be reduced by creating phytochemically rich plants and herbivores and by creating cultures that know how to combine foods into meals that nourish and satiate.

When art and science meet: integrating knowledge of French herders with science of foraging behavior.

ABSTRACT Landscapes are complex creative systems that continually transform due to ever-changing relationships among environments and organisms including human beings. During the past half-century, those who study these relationships and those who manage them have become increasingly isolated from one another in their attempts to understand and manage landscapes. As we have come to rely on experimental science to understand principles, we have diminished the importance of experiential knowledge in understanding and implementing practices. In this paper, we discuss convergence of the knowledge of herders from Southeastern France with the science of foraging behavior. We review insights of researchers gained through interviews with herders, surveys, and in situ recordings of the foraging behavior of closely herded sheep and goats. Though years of hands-on experience, herders have come to understand processes involved in food and habitat selection. Using a conceptual model of four steps, which represent four intertwined processes for a given herder-herd-fodder resource, we describe how herders 1) teach their animals to use the full range of forages, 2) train the herd to respect the boundaries of grazing areas, 3) modulate what they call the “temporary palatability scoring” of forages, and 4) establish daily grazing circuits to stimulate appetite and intake through meal sequencing. This knowledge is also valuable when the objective is to boost appetite for particular forages, such as coarse grasses, scrub, and invasive species. The practices of herders are consistent with scientific studies that show the importance of plant biodiversity for enabling animals to select nutritious diets and the significance of animal learning and culture on nutrition, production, and health. We conclude by highlighting implications for furthering the exchange between herders and scientists and by providing implications for managing grazing on pastures and rangelands, with or without shepherds and dogs, and targeting grazing on particular plants and habitats.

How French shepherds create meal sequences to stimulate intake and optimise use of forage diversity on rangeland

European rangelands have rugged terrain with highly diverse patchworks of vegetation communities. They are mostly public lands that were abandoned for more than 50 years, because they served no purpose at the time of animal husbandry modernisation. The European Union’s policy now promotes the reintroduction of grazing on rangelands to prevent wildfires and to restore habitats for biodiversity conservation. Facing the lack of knowledge to implement such a policy, researchers, nature managers, and pastoral advisors began working closely with shepherds and goat herders in France, who had persisted in using rangelands. The research presented here is part of this collective effort to understand and assess the experiential knowledge and feeding practices that herders use for livestock. The study required in situ and simultaneous recording of several types of information at different levels of organisation – herder, herd, individual animal – using methods from scientific disciplines ranging from ethnology to animal behavioural ecology and landscape ecology. The results for herded animals were surprising; they had daily intake levels often twice those observed in controlled studies with forages of similar nutritive values. The reason became clear when we learned that herders use grazing circuits that sequence a meal into a succession of contrasting and complementary grazing ‘sectors’ that boost appetite and intake. Our modelling of this practice in MENU, a model conceived and developed with experienced herders, shows how a herder can use understanding of complementarities among sectors to sequence meals that increase appetite and intake and ensure renewal of resources at the landscape level, or conversely, to apply more intensive grazing impact on particular target sectors.

Continuous bite monitoring: a method to assess the foraging dynamics of herbivores in natural grazing conditions

Accurate estimates of bite mass and variations in the short-term intake rate of grazing herbivores has been historically considered as a fundamental methodological difficulty, a difficulty that increases with the complexity of the feeding environment. Improving these methodologies will help understand foraging behaviours in natural grazing conditions, where habitat structure and interactions among different forages influence feeding decisions and patterns. During the past 30 years, we have been developing the ‘continuous bite-monitoring’ method, an observational method that allows continuous assessment of foraging behaviours, including bite mass, instantaneous intake rate and food selection, in simple to complex feeding environments. The centrepiece of the method is a ‘bite-coding grid’ where bites are categorised by structural attributes of the forage to reflect differences in bite masses. Over the years, we have been using this method with goats, sheep, llamas and cattle across a range of different habitats. After reviewing the development of the method, we detail its planning and execution in the field. We illustrate the method with a study from southern Brazilian native Pampa grassland, showing how changes in the forages consumed by heifers strongly affect short-term intake rate during meals. Finally, we emphasise the importance of studying animals grazing in their natural environments to first identify the relevant processes that can later be tested in controlled experiments.