Project
Title
Agro-ecology scenarios and solutions for dairy production systems in Europe
Acronym
DairyPathS
Start
01.02.2026
End
31.01.2029
Coordinating Institute
Leibniz-Institut für Agrartechnik und Bioökonomie e.V. (ATB)
Coordinator
Partner
Eurac Research - Institute for Regional Development
Institut National de Recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement
Ruralis - Institute for Rural and Regional Research
Aarhus Universität - UA
UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Allocated to research program
Summary
DairyPathS aims to advance the agroecological transition of European dairy farming by addressing the environmental, economic and social challenges of intensive systems. Many dairy farms still generate high greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions, nutrient losses, soil and water degradation and biodiversity decline, while lacking tools that integrate environmental, economic and social metrics. Behavioural and structural barriers to adopting agroecological practices also remain insufficiently understood. To address these issues, the project establishes regional Living Labs (LL) across Europe, where farmers, advisors, researchers, and policymakers co-design agroecological scenarios reflecting regional conditions. These include diversified cropping, legumes, agroforestry, improved nutrient circularity, mixed crop-livestock systems, adaptive grazing and cooperative or landscape level management. The LLs ensure that assessments reflect practical constraints, stakeholder priorities and socio-economic context. The scenarios are quantified using multi-scale models for crops, grasslands, livestock, whole-farm bioeconomics and agent-based behaviour. These simulations analyse productivity, emissions, nutrient flows, resilience under current and future climates, economic feasibility and behavioural responses. In parallel, DairyPathS advances biodiversity and ecosystem-service (ES) assessment and links these methods with model outputs at field, farm and landscape scales. All results feed into an expanded multi-criteria assessment framework (DEXi-Dairy), which integrates new indicators for biodiversity, ES, economics and social aspects, along with fuzzy-logic aggregation and stakeholder-based weightings. The outputs are finally integrated into a digital decision-support platform that provides farmers, advisors and policymakers with accessible options for a sustainable agroecological redesign of European dairy systems.
Funding
Bundesministerium für Landwirtschaft, Ernährung und Heimat (BMLEH)
Funding agency
Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (BLE)
Funding framework
Second AGROECOLOGY Call