Our survey of cattle grazing management for nature conservation revealed that the combination of grazing for beef production and grazing for biodiversity conservation is challenging to integrate in contemporary agricultural practice. A high proportion of the beef producers enrolled under the conservation grazing label ‘Friland Naturpleje‘ mainly let their cattle graze improved grass leys or permanent grassland with no obvious conservation value. This is not caused by a landscape level deficit of or inaccessibility to high conservation value habitat, because we generally found ungrazed high-value areas in the vicinity of the current grazing areas, suggesting that they have been abandoned for other reasons than geographical distance. This finding is conservative, because some beef producers manage grazing areas interspersed by such distances that our mapping greatly underestimates the area of high conservation value that could potentially be grazed. Our results are in accordance with previous findings, where abandonment has been acknowledged as a major threat to the biodiversity of semi-natural areas in Europe (MacDonald et al. 2000, Pykälä et al. 2005, Enyedi et al. 2008). Despite attempts to restore the grazing process by directing subsidies to High Nature Value farming areas (HNV) in Europe (e.g., Brunbjerg et al. 2016), dereliction and scrub encroachment remain a threat to species and habitats of high conservation importance (Sucháčková 2021), also in lowland northern Europe (Dengler et al. 2020). Grazing is a key ecological process (van Wieren 1995, Svenning 2002, Enquist et al. 2020) and it appears obvious that the current stock of free ranging cattle needs to be redistributed from improved leys and set aside arable land to high conservation value nature, in order to overcome the encroachment and lingering loss of species associated with warm and open habitats (Robertson et al. 1995, Öckinger et al. 2006). In the current situation, it seems obvious that economic incentives are too weak to stimulate private landowners to advertise their potential grazing land to cattle farmers.
Abandonment of livestock grazing could be considered an opportunity for passive rewilding (Perino et al. 2019), making space for a comeback of wild large herbivores. However, absence of livestock is unlikely to lead to a natural grazing function in European ecosystems, because the herbivorous mammal fauna of Europe is deeply depauperated and skewed towards small-bodies species (Sommer 2020) and because the density of extant wild herbivores is regulated by hunting to far below natural levels (Fløjgaard et al. 2022). Despite recent re-introduction of beaver to Denmark, the native large free-ranging herbivore guild mainly comprises red deer, fallow deer and roe deer, and the density of these herbivores at county level has been estimated to be in the range of 1–8 kg ha− 1 (Fløjgaard et al. 2021), which is extremely low compared to a natural baseline estimated to be in the range of 70–250 kg ha− 1 (Fløjgaard et al. 2021, Fløjgaard et al. 2022). Alongside the lack of wild large herbivores, additional natural processes, such as natural hydrology or fire, are absent or heavily controlled in most European landscapes. Although passive rewilding may lead to a gradual recovery of natural vegetation and hydrology, it is expected to jeopardize the conservation of biodiversity associated with open grazing-dependent habitats.
The ownership structure of the human-dominated landscapes may represent a major obstacle to focused distribution of livestock to areas of grazing-dependent high conservation value. In Denmark, coastal and riparian wetlands are typically divided into narrow strips of land allotted to a large number of individual landowners. Although intensive cultivation has ceased in many marginal wetlands and coastal areas, this has not automatically resulted in room for natural ecosystem processes. Abandoned areas are generally tied up in recreative interests – such as walking, running, swimming, biking, fishing and hunting – and these interests are often perceived as incompatible with perimeter fences and free-roaming cattle. Forestry may also obstruct conservation grazing, as the Danish forest legislation largely prohibits livestock grazing (Anon 2019). On top of these obstacles to natural grazing, the Danish traffic legislation forbids the passing of public roads by domestic cattle and the watercourse legislation limits livestock access to and passage of streams and rivers.
Alongside grazing abandonment and encroachment in high conservation value areas, we observed clear indications of widespread overgrazing among beef producers (Fig. 5A). Cattle grazing was concentrated in the summer months, during which stocking rates often exceeded 400 kg ha− 1, which is twice or more the estimated natural level (Fløjgaard et al. 2021). Overgrazing is widely acknowledged as a threat to biodiversity, mainly because large herbivores in high densities reduce the availability of plant foliage and flowers for herbivorous and flower-seeking insects (e.g., Wallis deVries et al. 2005, van Klink et al. 2015, Kindvall et al. 2022). However, also plant species can be negatively affected by high stocking rates (Herrero-Jáuregui & Oesterheld 2018). Overgrazing is closely associated with summer grazing followed by stabling and feeding of cattle through the winter season. Under natural conditions without supplementary feeding, forage limitation during winter sets an upper limit to the carrying capacity of an area. Unfortunately, summer grazing is preferred over year-round grazing, and the producers participating in our study mentioned several reasons for this patterm. These reasons are reported below in arbitrary order (pers. comm.). First, the producers prefer to keep their animals stabled during winter for animal welfare reasons. Second, they prefer to have cattle under close surveillance during calving in early spring. Third, several producers work with high-yielding breeds such as Limousin, Simmental and Charolais, which all need a steady supply of protein-rich fodder to thrive and avoid weight loss. The selection of breeds might also be influenced by economic incentives due to costs for butchering per individual. This economic incentive works against the use of small-bodied robust cattle breeds, such as Galloway and Dexter. These trends are mirrored in studies of farmers enrolled in agri-environmental schemes in other European countries (Schulz et al. 2017).
In our understanding, the overarching reason for unfocused distribution and seasonal overgrazing is the economic incentives of the common agricultural policy of EU, as well as its Danish implementation thereof. Despite attempts to allocate subsidies to high nature value farmland, the highest revenue per hectare is currently achieved by farmers when the basic agricultural subsidy can be combined with a surplus subsidy for conservation grazing (Olsen et al. 2022). The basic subsidy requires the areas to be managed so intensively during summer that they can pass the field control by authorities and deemed “well-managed farmland”. A precondition for this is a near-absence of wet depressions, thorny shrubs and trees and of tufts of heather, sedges, rushes, ferns and other unpalatable plants. In practice, farmers achieve the required uniform condition by a combination of intense summer grazing and intermittent machine cutting of unpalatable plants, which also levels out microtopographic variation caused by ants, tuft building sedges, dung piles, moles and animal trampling. Thus, keeping areas as well-managed farmland is at direct odds with natural ecosystems processes underpinning a diversity of microhabitats. In contrast, conservation grazing should be considered one aspect of a holistic ecological restoration and conservation including natural vegetation, ancient trees, natural hydrology and coastal dynamic processes.
The current EU biodiversity strategy implies a designation of 30% of terrestrial and marine areas as protected (20%) and strictly protected (10%) land (EC 2020b). While rewilding with introduction of wild and feral large herbivores is an option for the ecological restoration of strictly protected areas, conservation grazing with domestic animals remains an important scenario for protected areas with limited human exploitation. This relies on the assumption that grazing practices in these areas follow ecological guidelines suited to mimic a natural grazing process, as opposed to current practices guided by agricultural tradition and counter-productive incentives. It should be acknowledged that livestock-grazed areas not necessarily offer habitat for the entire biota, e.g. not carrion-associated fauna and funga, and therefore should be considered a supplement to, not replacement for, strictly protected areas with near-intact ecosystems.