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The world's rangelands and drylands are undergoing rapid change, and consequently are becoming more difficult to manage. Big data and digital technologies (digital tools) provide land managers with a means to understand and adaptively manage change. An assortment of tools—including standardized field ecosystem monitoring databases; web‐accessible maps of vegetation change, production forecasts, and climate risk; sensor networks and virtual fencing; mobile applications to collect and access a variety of data; and new models, interpretive tools, and tool libraries—together provide unprecedented opportunities to detect and direct rangeland change. Accessibility to and manager trust in and knowledge of these tools, however, have failed to keep pace with technological advances. Collaborative adaptive management that involves multiple stakeholders and scientists who learn from management actions is ideally suited to capitalize on an integrated suite of digital tools. Embedding science professionals and experienced technology users in social networks can enhance peer‐to‐peer learning about digital tools and fulfill their considerable promise. 

CONTEXT: The southwestern United States is experiencing an increasingly warmer and drier climate that is affecting cattle production systems of the region. Adaptation strategies are needed that will not compromise environmental quality or profitability. Options include the use of desert-adapted beef cattle biotypes, such as Rarámuri Criollo cattle, and crossbreds of Criollo with more traditional British breeds. Currently, most calves raised in the Southwest are grain finished, often with irrigated crops produced in the hydrologically-threatened Ogallala Aquifer region. A viable alternative may be grass finishing with the rainfed forage of the arid and semi-arid rangeland of the Southwest or in the temperate grasslands of the Northern Plains. OBJECTIVE: Compare the environmental impacts and production costs of grain-finishing in Texas and grass-finishing in the Northern plains and the Southwest with traditional Angus cattle vs. Criollo and Criollo x Angus cattle. METHODS: Nine supply chain strategies were simulated using the Integrated Farm System Model to compare farm-gate life cycle intensities of greenhouse gas emissions (carbon footprint), fossil energy footprint, nitrogen footprint, blue water footprint and production costs using representative (appropriate soils, climate, and management) ranch and feedlot operations. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: For both finishing options (grass, grain), Criollo x Angus cattle had the best environmental (3%-27% lower), and production cost (4-23% lower) outcomes followed by pure Criollo and then Angus cattle. Crossbred production combined the lower feed supplementation requirements of Criollo cows with heavier final carcasses of offspring from Angus genetics. Crossbred cattle with grass finishing in the Southwest or Northern Plains outperformed on most environmental variables as well as production costs, mostly due to reduced external input requirements (primarily feed). A downside for grass-finished crossbreds was greater carbon footprint (27-42% higher) compared to grain finishing due to greater methane emissions from high forage diets and an extended time to finish. On grasslands where soil C sequestration can be supported, that land-based sequestration may offset the greater greenhouse gas emission from enteric methane of grass-finished beef. Grass finishing in the Northern Plains may provide a more reliable meat supply chain than grass finishing in the Southwest due to the lower risk and less severe consequences of drought. SIGNIFICANCE: Alternative beef supply chain options using Rarámuri Criollo cattle were found to be sustainable production systems that can be adopted by ranchers in the southwestern United States to adapt to the changing climate. 

Circular management of beef supply chains holds great promise for improving sustainability from grazing agroecosystem to dinner plate. In the United States and Canada, one approach to circularity entails transporting manure nutrients from cattle produced in feedlots back to the grazing agroecosystems where they originated to enrich haylands for further grazing cattle production. We provide data to assess this strategy centered around three grazing agroecosystems: Florida, New Mexico, and the provincial assemblage of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia. We describe four datasets that can be used to estimate the potential nutrient utilization of hay fed to grazing cattle in the three grazing agroecosystems and the magnitudes of feedlot manure nutrients available for transport back to them. We found that although biogeography and management differ among the three grazing agroecosystems, the hay allocated for grazing cattle represented approximately 65% of the total harvested hay produced per agroecosystem after accounting for harvest losses, and that on average all three areas exported about 450,000 cattle annually for feedlot, pasture, and slaughter to states across the US. Although we highlight only three grazingland settings, our approach relies on methods that could ultimately be scaled nationally and internationally, with applicability to other animal industries for which circular management is an aspiration for sustainability outcomes. 

New Mexico (NM) has been identified as the state in the US that will be most adversely impacted by climate change and associated water stress. Roughly 92% of NM is rangeland, most of which is grazed by beef cattle. We calculated the blue (surface and ground) and green (precipitation) water footprints (WF) of NM beef cattle industry (cow-calf, backgrounding, and feedlot). This analysis indicated that the weighted average WF of NM beef cattle was 28,203 L/kgmeat. The majority of the WF was accounted for green water (82%; 23,063 L/kgmeat) used by rangeland forages. Blue water accounted for only 18% (5140 L/kgmeat) of the total beef WF estimate. The relative contribution of green vs. blue water varied significantly among the different phases of beef production. In cow-calf, green water accounted for 99.5% of the WF whereas blue water, accounted for 100% of beef WF during backgrounding and feedlot. Based on our estimate, NM cow-calf operations is about a third or a quarter of the blue water (m3/year) used to produce corn or wheat, and only 5% or less of the water used to produce cotton or hay. In NM, irrigation accounts for about 84% of freshwater use followed by public/domestic use of 10%. Mining, thermo-electric, livestock production, aquaculture, and industrial uses collectively account for the other 6%.