Abstract: European livestock agriculture is extraordinarily diverse, and so are the challenges it faces. This diversity has contributed to the development of a fragmented set of research communities. As a result, livestock research is often under-represented at policy level, despite its high relevance for the environment and food security.  Understanding livestock systems and how they can sustainably adapt to global change requires inputs across research areas, including grasslands, nutrition, health, welfare and ecology. It also requires experimental researchers, modellers and stakeholders to work closely together.  Networks and capacity building structures are vital to enable livestock research to meet the challenges of climate change. They need to maintain shared resources and provide non-competitive arenas to share and synthesize results for policy support.  ï‚· Long term strategic investment is needed to support such structures. Their leadership requires very different skills to those effective in scientific project coordination.

Abstract: The report presented here provides an inventory of reports and conference papers  produced by the partners of the livestock and grassland modelling theme (LiveM) of the  Modelling European Agriculture with Climate Change for Food Security (MACSUR)  knowledge hub. The findings presented illustrate the diverse nature of the multidisciplinary  LiveM research community, and provide a reference source for those seeking  to identify and pull out farm-level modelling outputs from the work of MACSUR and its  partners. The survey of farm-scale outputs from LiveM revealed the interdependent, dual  role of a knowledge hub: to increase the capacity of modelling to meet stakeholder and  societal needs under climate change, and to apply that increased capacity to provide new  understanding and solutions at the policy and (the focus here) farm scale. While capacity  building work across disciplines is time-consuming, difficult, and to a large extent invisible  to stakeholders, such work is vital to ensuring that subsequent scientific outcomes reflect  best practice, and integrated expertise. Long term, sustained funding of network-based  capacity building activities is highlighted as essential to ensuring that the farm-scale  modelling work highlighted here can continue to build on ongoing improvements in model  quality, flexibility and stakeholder relevance.