Meat quality, multifunctionality, and functional integrity of agropastoral livestock systems: past and present insights from a French native grassland-based beef production

This study explores the dynamics of developing an agropastoral cattle production system based on natural permanent grasslands in southern France, using the Fin Gras du Mézenc PDO as a case study. To comprehend interactions between the multifunctionality of grazing systems and production quality, we propose the concept of extended quality, which combines intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions, integrating material aspects, social construction, and territorial inscription. We ask whether the shaping of extended quality can facilitate the structuring and maintenance of the functional integrity of a suckler farming system over time. To account for both the technical and territorial dimensions of quality, our analysis focuses on an agroecosystem embedded in and interacting with a broader socio-technical and market environment. The article is based on an interdisciplinary qualitative methodology, situated at the intersection of biotechnical analysis of livestock systems (farm trajectories) and socio-historical methodology (interviews, archives). Our results show a grassland-pastoral system structured around socio-technical know-how in cattle fattening. From the 1970s, this system was challenged by dairy expansion and lean cattle, before quality-meat specifications in the 1990s reconfigured socio-technical networks, generating enduring economic and social value for the stakeholders of the agroecosystem. In conclusion, extended quality appears to be a fruitful approach to the reconstruction of a livestock grazing agroecosystem’s functional integrity, achieved by the gradual reorganisation of its various functions over time. The diachronic perspective developed here highlights the crucial importance of the elaboration and commercialization and cognitive renewal functions, which are critical dimensions that exert long-term influence on other functional dimensions.