The project facilitates participatory design of Mixed Farming and Agroforestry Systems (MiFAS) supporting environmental and climate change mitigation and adaptation potential while addressing technical, agronomic and socio-economic challenges. Therefore, at the heart of MIXED is a multi-actor approach working with networks of farmers and other stakeholders in 10 countries.

Together with networks of farmers, the project identifies and investigates a variety of bottlenecks– related to MiFAS on-farm, in landscapes and value chains - and potential solutions that can contribute to sufficient and stable income, ecosystem services and climate mitigation.

The project follows a three-step process:

• first identifying problems that have been faced and solved by the network members;
• secondly problems that still exist for the network members but have been addressed and/or solved by other networks within the project, and
• finally 'new' problems that have not yet been addressed in other contexts. The work to address specific identified challenges (e.g. technical, environmental, labour and gender issues) takes place through a range of field workshops, cross network reflection workshops and small action projects within the networks.

The project will prepare:

• a European MiFAS ‘state of the art’ and future scenario publication
• a guide to mixed farming in Europe - reporting the experiences of the mixed farming based organisations, focussing on the problems and solutions from the networks that describes not only the fieldwork and results but also the farmers’ and academics experience of the process.

Scientific publications: 

Bucking the trend: Crop farmers' motivations for reintegrating livestock

Authors: Clémentine Meunier, Guillaume Martin, Cécile Barnaud, Julie Ryschawy

Published in: Agricultural Systems, Volume 214, February 2024