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Conservation agriculture (CA) is promoted as a promising technology to stabilize or improve crop yields in Africa and Madagascar. However, small-scale farmers face difficulties to retain soil cover, mainly because of competing uses for the biomass produced, especially to feed cattle. To explore the relation between dairy production and CA we developed an optimisation model at farm level. Our aim was to explore trade-offs between CA practices and the size of dairy cow herds. Our model includes three main components: the farm, the crops and the cattle herd. The optimisation was made on the total net income for three years. Biomass produced by cropping activities can either serve as mulch or to feed cows. We applied a constraint on the minimum soil cover % to keep at the end of each year for CA fields: from 30% to 95%. We simulated two scenarios of milk market: a small milk market with low forage price and an …