Evolution of Grazing Practices in Belgian Dairy Farms: Results of Two Surveys
, Samuel Jacquet 2, Didier Veselko 3, Emile Piraux 3 and Isabelle Dufrasne 1,2,*
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I see that authors made a diffuse work to address the issues pointed out during the first revision.
I confirm that this is a good, concise work that analyse quite sharply a problem with a simple but reliable methodology of interview.
The process of gaining information has been clearly presented in the body of the text and overall this paper is easy-to-read, which is not a common thing for this kind of assessment.
I don’t see any structural problem, now introduction and conclusions sounds more focused on GHG emissions and links between the evaluation of interview and discussion is now clear.
I don’t have any further remark. I just suggest to the authors to carefully read the paper to correct few stylistic mistakes.
Good luck.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your encouragements.
I read once again the text and changed some sentences for a better clarity.
Best regards,
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Please define all abbreviations the first time they appear in the abstract, the main text, and the first figure or table caption. Now you use abbreviations, before full name, e.g. EU, C stocks.
Define „C stocks”, C storage,
Use full names of gases or chemical symbols. Now you mix it with (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide and CO2, N).
After the sentence: „Moreover, 5% of arable lands have to be converted in permanent grasslands”, I’d recommend adding citations to this section.
The article should be written in an impersonal form.
„The objectives of the study were: (..) To identify the reluctances to the implementations of EU policies about land use and land use changes and to define levers to improve the sustainable practices of Walloon dairy far” - Now is "identify the reluctance to implementations of EU policies". Should be "identify the relationship with the EU policies" or something like that. The study imposed a negative result.
What was the research sample?
How was the population size determined?
Figure 1 has an unreadable description.
What was the median of the answers?
What was the standard slack?
What was the average value?
The Conclusions are insufficient.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I read your comments with attention.
However I met difficulties with some points you asked me to clarify.
If ever you find answers still incomplete, I'm ready to provide you with more details.
Thank you for your attentive reading,
Yours Faithfully,
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
I have checked the revised "new" versione of the manuscript under the title "Evolution of Grazing Practices in Belgian Dairy Farms: Results of two Surveys". The Authors made all necessary corrections. Therefore I have no other comments.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I thank you for your attentive reading,
Best regards,
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Everything is ok.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper entitled “Evolution of Grazing Practices in Belgian Dairy Farms: Results of two Surveys” sums up the comparative results of two surveys conducted between 2016 and 2019 to see how dairy farmers changed their activity.
The paper sounds quite easy-to-read and it is overall comprehensible. Despite few mistakes here and there I have some major remarks to the structure: 1) abstract introduces GHG and the Common Agricultural Policies in EU. It is expected that this survey links the results with GHG effects revealing how e new grazing management can promote the application of greening measures. 2) Introduction is too poor. GHG is an argument that has to be adequately introduced, as long as the Ecosystem Service of carbon pooling and air filtering that the grassland can play to reduce GHG. 3) Conclusions are inconsistent with premises (abstract). Therefore, authors have to work extending their consideration to a policy orientation. Otherwise this manuscript sounds like a synthesis of a survey rather than a scientific paper.
I think the body of the methodology (the survey) gives important results, and therefore I see a promising space to transform this manuscript into a more complete and detailed one.
Attached my detailed comments.
Good luck!
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In my opinion, the authors can not write an article. I've never seen such a bad manuscript like this one. No introduction, no description of the test method, no description of the test sample ....
The authors did not want to format the article correctly. They did it very badly and chaotically. What research method was used? What was the test sample?
What is the novelty for this article compared with existing studies? What is
the main aim of the article? The introduction should describe the
current state of knowledge in this topic. In my opinion, authors not
presented an extensive literature review. There is no systematic approach to confine the knowledge gap of the problem statement. Thereby, the novelty of this paper is not
clearly presented. Literature review has only 11 items!
The introduction has only 9 lines!
Discussion of results and conlusions - very poor. Conclusions have only 4 lines! What are the conclusions? Nothing follows from this.
Abstract is incorrect. The abstract should be more concise, and I suggest authors provide the background, target, significance, methodology, main results, and so on, in this abstract.
For a journal paper, it is important to present some orginal contribution. In this paper, there is absolutely no orginal contribution. There is no interesting or useful material for an average reader.
This paper is too light.
Taking all mentioned comments, it can be concluded that this article DID NOT meet the requirements of the journal and cannot consider for the publication.
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript under the title "Evolution of Grazing Practices in Belgian Dairy Farms: Results of two Surveys" is interesting but needs impovements.
Comments to the Authors are presented below.
Abstract - The abstract is too general. Do not put literature references in an abstract. Please edit.
Page 1, Please use a full name before abbreviation - Greenhouse Gas (GHG).
The Authors refer in the text to Figures 1 to 4 and Tables 1 to 2. However, they have not been included in the manuscript. Please edit.
The refernce list is very poor and needs to be supplemented with more scientific works and data.
In the below-mentioned literature reference, the year of publication is missing, please edit:
Soussana J. F., Tallec T., Blanfort V. Mitigating the greenhouse gas balance of ruminant production 21 systems through carbon sequestration in grasslands, Animal, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 334–350.
In conclusion, the subject of the research is interesting but described in general overall.
Reviewer 4 Report
As the manuscript has been poorly organised and very difficult to follow, I am regret to reject it. Some comments are as follows:
it is quite unusual to include references in Abstract as Abstract is normally employed to summary the study and give the readers a full picture of the research.
too many details in the abstract section such as line 17-19, 32.6% and 96.4% in line 21
in contrast, the Introduction section should have included more background information about this research, literature reviews to identify the research gap. And also, the research question should have been clearly described here.
the section 2 only included very general introduction about the project. Detailed description about methodology and framework is required.
the Results section presented detailed results, which is good. However, analysis is essential for this part.
Conclusion section only contains several sentences with the research results and future application overlooked. This section should have summary the results and analysis, state the limitations and suggest future studies...
