Examining the trade-offs between agri-environmental and manure policies in Dutch dairy farming

Farmers increasingly have to navigate through a complex web of agricultural and environmental regulations. In the EU, for example, the Nitrate Directive aims to control the nutrient levels in the water and agri-environmental schemes aim to protect habitats and increase biodiversity. The trade-offs between such environmental policies are not clear. Therefore, this paper studies the interaction between manure policy, especially derogation policy, and meadow bird schemes for the Netherlands. We develop a mathematical programming farm model with nine representative dairy farm types, based on locat... Mehr ...