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As the second largest exporter of agricultural products worldwide, the Netherlands is a production hub, a leading example of high yields per hectare. However, this productivity includes intensive farming practices, placing a risk on the climate through the emission of greenhouse gases N2O and CO2 from soil. To meet global efforts, the Netherlands must reduce its climatic impact, including soil emissions, but the transition to alternative farming practices can be challenging. This research identifies the barriers and opportunities for arable farmers to adopt practices which mitigate emissions from agricultural soils, and consists of a literature review, informant interviews, and semi-structured interviews with farmers, policy-makers, and boundary organizations. Main findings are (1) a lack of awareness by farmers of their soil greenhouse gas production, and (2) six barriers and five opportunities for farmer adoption with placement of these findings into different steps of adoption. Critical barriers include economic challenges, personal mindset, on-farm complications, and the need to reconcile different stakeholders' rates of adoption. Opportunities lie with farmers becoming interested and able to quantify soil health, positive framing in the media, and policies or economic mechanisms to assist farmers. If the Netherlands can transition its farming system, the opportunities for the global food system could be significant.

As fresh water supplies become more unreliable, variable and expensive, the water-related implications of sustainable agriculture practices such as cover cropping are drawing increasing attention from California's agricultural communities. However, the adoption of winter cover cropping remains limited among specialty crop growers who face uncertainty regarding the water use of this practice. To investigate how winter cover crops affect soil water and evapotranspiration on farm fields, we studied three systems that span climatic and farming conditions in California's Central Valley: processing tomato fields with cover crop, almond orchards with cover crop, and almond orchards with native vegetation. From 2016 to 2019, we collected soil moisture data (3 years of neutron hydroprobe and gravimetric tests at 10 field sites) and evapotranspiration measurements (2 years at two of 10 sites) in winter cover cropped and control (clean-cultivated, bare ground) plots during winter months. Generally, there were not significant differences in soil moisture between cover cropped and control fields throughout or at the end of the winter seasons, while evapo-transpirative losses due to winter cover crops were negligible relative to clean-cultivated soil. Our results suggest that winter cover crops in the Central Valley may break even in terms of actual consumptive water use. California growers of high-value specialty crops can likely adopt winter cover cropping without altering their irrigation plans and management practices.

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