Livestock farming is often addressed as one of the most impactful food production systems on the environment due to GHGE-Green-House Gas Emissions- and land use degradation. However, in the last years there is a growing number of studies that underline the beneficial environmental impacts of extensive livestock farming (i.e., providing ecosystem services, increasing biodiversity and improving carbon and nitrogen cycles), as well as social and economic benefits (i.e., offering alternative and additional forms of income in marginal areas). The multitude of livestock management approaches call urgently for specific tools of assessment in order to inform and orientate policies, farming practices and consumer choices. This study proposes a set of 14 agroecological indicators to assess the state of structural/planned agrobiodiversity in livestock farming systems. Our methodology stems from the already established Indicator-Based Framework to evaluate the sustainability of farming systems and adapted it specifically to livestock farming systems. The set of indicators has been clustered with respect to the ecosystem functions/services they describe. The methodology has been applied and validated on a selection of 12 Italian organic livestock farms and analyzed according to animal breeds and geographical regions. The results highlight that the farms show very positive results with optimal values for all indicators, except for Field Adjacency (FA), Share Species (SS), Share Group (SG). This study highlights how livestock farms could actually provide different ecosystem services in comparison to stockless farms.

Commons and commoning have been historically instrumental in sustaining livelihoods in Alpine areas. After decades of abandonment and oblivion, a process of repopulation is instilling new life there, with community building emerging from new and old highlanders’ commoning. Focusing an anthropological lens on these processes, this study investigates community ovens in the Western Italian Alps as commons, and their relighting as a process of commoning that engenders community building through bread, kneading, and baking. We capture the ovens’ relighting as a heterogeneous and experimental process that manifests in fluid ways in different hamlets based on the commoners’ different backgrounds, ideologies, and visions. We further reflect on the capacity of the process to trigger ripple effects upstream and downstream local food chains, to shape ways of living the mountains and of relating with the world beyond the hamlet and the valley, and to root these renewed Alpine communities to place.

After almost a century of abandonment, in the last three decades the Western Italian Alps are witnessing a process of repopulation, urban-rural migration, and reactivation of agriculture and food production. However, ‘new highlanders’ moving to these Alpine valleys with the willingness to start farming find that fields and meadows have been claimed by shrubs, brambles, and trees, that locally adapted seeds and varieties have been largely lost, and that the transmission of the knowledge on how to farm these lands has been discontinued. This knowledge is even more important in such inner areas, where geographical and environmental conditions don’t allow conventional agriculture to be applied as such, and where the relationship with the surrounding ecosystems calls for knowledge intensive approaches to agriculture. Based on fieldwork in six valleys of the Western Italian Alps, in this study we focus on the dynamics surrounding agroecological knowledge, investigate the processes of its co-creation and sharing among new highlanders, and discuss the role of social collectives in this renewed knowledge transmission. We argue that, to inform their agricultural path, new highlanders rely on a plethora of sources of knowledge, which are local and global, in person and virtual. We also posit that the diverse social collectives linking locals with new and returning highlanders act as platforms for knowledge co-creation and sharing and for community building, where renewed agroecological knowledge and agrobiodiversity are mobilized. These platforms also support the revitalization of agrobiodiversity, the further adoption and adaptation of contextualized agroecological practices, acting as niches of innovation and fueling agroecological transitions and the back-to-the-land movement itself.