Agriculture has undergone dramatic changes over the past century. Many would argue that the changes have been unquestionably positive with huge gains in productivity, reduced labour requirements, and alleviation of food insecurity for most people. However, the adoption of increasingly specialized and separated crop and livestock enterprises has also had widespread negative consequences on biodiversity simplification, degradation of groundwater and surface waters with agrochemical pollutants, poor soil health with monoculture crop production, large greenhouse gas emissions from both specialized cropping systems relying on external inputs and concentrated animal feeding operations that accumulate wastes, and general lack of ecological integrity among components of these specialized systems. Integrated systems offer opportunities to reconnect the synergies available when mixed croplivestock systems rely on organic-based nutrient cycling dynamics, ecologically based weed, insect and disease controls, and system-level sharing of resources in a circular-based agroecosystem. We provide a few examples of how annual and perennial forages can be an integral component of integrated croplivestock systems, including grazing of cover crops, pasture-crop rotations, and among-farm integration. To be truly sustainable, the ecological integrity of agriculture requires different types of forages utilized across a diverse landscape.