Lessons learned in the NL MIXED network (source: https://www.wur.nl/en/show-longread/closing-the-cycle-with-your-neighbour.htm):

1. Thanks to specialization, mixed farms are now very much in the minority, but collaboration between livestock and arable farmers has continued in the region.
2. In Drenthe, more than half the land gets exchanged. That swapping of land is one of the ways in which farmers collaborate.
3. The collaboration is all about crop rotation, whereby a different crop is grown in a given field each year. By swapping fields with a livestock farmer, the crop farmer can grow the same quantity of seed crops every year, and because he grows them on new soils, he has fewer problems with diseases and pests in the soil. This reduces the spraying of pesticides.
4. Grass is grown in rotation on exchanged land too. It is feed for the livestock, and serves as a rest crop for the arable farmer. By growing, say, potatoes for a year after four years of grass, the livestock farmer can sow new herb-rich grassland every five years, and will not need to spray the field with herbicide to control weeds.
5. By using animal manure, the livestock farmer builds up organic matter in the soil, with nutrients that the arable farmer uses afterwards. An additional advantage is that with more organic matter, more water is retained in the soil.
6. Closing cycles regionally reduces CO2 and this is now rewarded through a price premium, i.e. in 2024, the dairy company FrieslandCampina has started paying farmers a CO2 premium.

Recommendations towards the future (source: https://www.wur.nl/en/show-longread/closing-the-cycle-with-your-neighbour.htm):

1. Sectoral thinking, in which arable and livestock farming are two different worlds, is ingrained in policy at present. We argue for an agricultural policy that takes the soil as its starting point.
2. The agriculture sector wants to shift from stipulations about the method, in which the government prescribes specific techniques or methods for achieving environmental targets, to stipulations about targets, which lay down the target or environmental norm, leaving farmers free to achieve them in their own way. Because environmental targets are statutory, target stipulations need to be measurable and enforceable, and supervisory bodies need to be able to hold farmers accountable.
3. In the development of target-driven management and the critical performance indicators (CPIs) that go with it, achievements are assessed per farm. To account for regional collaboartion, CPIs need to be developed that take into account regional nutrient cycles and land exchange.