Planning Crop–Livestock Integration With Social Norms: A Bio-Economic Model Balancing Circularity and Farmer Welfare

Abstract

Regional crop-livestock integration can reduce dependence on external inputs and improve circularity, but its implementation requires coordination across heterogeneous farms and may generate uneven welfare losses due to technical, economic and behavioural factors, including social norms and peer effects. This study develops a landscape bio-economic model that integrates heterogeneous farmer preferences, farm-level constraints and social coordination via social norms and peer networks. Applied to a Dutch case study, the model identifies, from a social planner perspective, coordinated integration strategies that optimise feed and manure exchanges between arable and dairy farms. We show that optimising farm-to-farm integration can reduce total nitrogen import by up to 20% with limited losses of farmer welfare relative to the unconstrained welfare-maximising solution. The model estimates farm-specific willingness-to-accept imposed circularity targets, accounting for losses across economic and non-economic utility attributes, including social norm conformity. Willingness-to-accept increases non-linearly as nitrogen reduction targets become more stringent, with the burden initially borne mainly by sustainability-oriented and dairy farms, while extending to arable and conventional farms only at very ambitious targets. We also find that stronger preferences for social norm conformity can ease trade-offs between farmer welfare and circularity and are associated with greater reliance on local feed exchange and a reduced role for manure exchange, indicating that social influence is practice-specific. These results motivate targeted and phased policy programmes combined with coordination incentives.