Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions on Dutch dairy farms. An efficiency analysis incorporating the circularity principle.

Circular agriculture is vital to achieve a substantial reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Optimizing resources and land use are an essential circularity principle. The objective of this article is to assess the extent to which land optimization can simultaneously reduce GHG emissions and increase production on dairy farms. In addition, we explore the potential reduction of GHG emissions under four different pathways. The empirical application combines the network Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the by-production approach. This study focuses on a representative sample of Dutch dairy farms over the period of 2010–2019. Our results suggest that farms can simultaneously increase production and reduce GHG emissions by both 5.1%. However, only 0.6% can be attributed to land optimization. The land optimization results show that on average 25.3% of total farm size should be allocated to cropland, which is 6.7% more than the actual land allocation. GHG emissions could be reduced by 11.79% without changing the level of inputs and outputs. This can be achieved by catching up with the mitigation practices of the best performing peers.