Integrating crop and livestock is broadly seen as an ideal option to maintain agricultural production levels while limiting environmental impacts on soil and biodiversity. Still, European crop-livestock farms keep declining due to globalized markets, agricultural policies and limited availability of workforce and skills. Reconnecting neighbouring specialized crop farms and livestock farms through grain, fodder, crop by-products and manure exchanges could be an alternative to overcome these limiting factors. Up to now, such collective organization is still rarely observed despite its potential advantages. In this study, we tried to understand farmers’ perceptions to highlight levers and barriers to crop-livestock integration beyond farm level. We analyzed interviews of 19 farmers interested in building such collaborations in Ariege, South- western France (8 crop farmers, 7 livestock farmers and 4 crop-livestock farmers). We observed different levels of involvement considered by the farmers ranging from wishing to buy local feed or establish new crops only if a local cooperative was creating contracts, to wishing to build a strong collaboration among local group over time. Different types of collective organization were mentioned, ranging from polycentric organization involving only farmers up to a governance through a local cooperative. The main barriers were related to logistics and storage, time management, low costs of inputs as regards to the time needed to implement such local cooperation, and establishment of trust. The main levers were the existence of local cooperatives or machinery groups that could drive the project and establish contracts, new policies oriented toward collective actions and a niche-market that recognized the interest of local feed for livestock. We highlighted a strong implicit divergence between the mindsets of crop farmers relative to livestock farmers that could hinder this type of local cooperation as they have few relationships and low trust. We suggest that farmers that already have both crops and livestock may be an ideal-type to improve ties between specialized farmers. In-depth analysis of farmer motivations and long-term efforts to build strong local networks and new policies would thus be key to favour the development of crop-livestock integration beyond farm level.