Integrated crop-dairy systems as a solution towards circularity in agriculture

A reintegration of crop and livestock production is seen as a way to move towards to a more sustainable agricultural production. This study focuses on the regional integration of crop- and dairy production. This is based on the idea that increasing crop diversity, achieved by the introduction of crop rotations combining forage crops and temporary grassland with cash-crop production, can mitigate the environmental impacts of crop and dairy production and can contribute to the development of a resilient agricultural system. Although potential benefits of these so called ley-arable systems are well described, an integrated assessment considering the long-term environmental effects and the potential to combine different plant functional traits in crop rotations is missing. In addition, the regional integration of crop-dairy integration has never been examined from a food system perspective.

Therefore, the aim of this PhD project is to perform an integrated assessment of crop-dairy integration to evaluate crop and animal performance, and the environmental and economic consequences of these strategies for different regions in the Netherlands. First, the performance of current and innovative crop rotations will be examined at field level. Second, data obtained from different cropping systems in the first step will be used to develop a regional optimization model which is based on linear programming. This second step is undertaken to quantify the environmental and economic consequences of an integrated crop-dairy system at regional level. This provides insight in trade-offs and synergies between environmental indicators at different aggregation levels. Finally, this newly developed model will be used in a scenario analysis to explore how possible future developments affect crop-dairy integration.