Designing biodiverse arable production systems for the Netherlands by involving various stakeholders

Abstract

A study was done that aimed at designing biodiverse crop production systems for the Netherlands taking into account the views held by stakeholders in society. Biodiverse crop production systems contain different species and/or different genotypes within a species, leave room for other plants (both spontaneous and sown plant species) and enhance the associated biodiversity of microfauna, mesofauna and microflora. The study was carried out jointly by closely co-operating scientists in the fields of agronomy, environmental sciences and social sciences. To integrate the knowledge of specialists and stakeholders a stakeholder consultation was done consisting of a literature review analysing the Dutch policy on biodiversity, a workshop consulting intermediary institutes about their views on arable biodiversity, and an expert panel that not only monitored the design process but also regularly discussed the developments during a three-year field test of a highly diverse production system that meanwhile was designed. The results of the study were used to compare the design with other production systems. In addition, a list of indicators was compiled to test this design for system performance in terms of societal (people), ecological (planet) and economic (profit) aspects. Finally, through this study, choices in the design process were made explicit and research topics were identified to test performance of the resulting system.