DairyBusiness

By Susan Harlow, editor, Northeast DairyBusiness

    Dairy’s response to climate change will be twofold – mitigating the impact on climate change and adapting to it. Give us more research to help reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, producers said at the  International Dairy Federation’s (IDF) First Dairy Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 23-26.

But much can be done now:

• Be a source of renewable energy. Kees Gorter of the Netherlands described his dairy’s biogas plant that provides electricity from manure and off-farm biowaste for his farm plus 1,500 other households. In the future, Gorter said, he expects to produce more gas and less electricity, which is less efficient.

Options are many for renewable energy on farms, said Paul Martin of Western United Dairyman in California, but cost is an obstacle for producers. In California, for instance, digesters run about $1,000 per cow. And at this point, energy doesn’t provide enough economic return to demand the attention of producers.

• Save energy through energy audits, conservation practices such as variable speed drives, building design and equipment maintenance.

• Use new technologies. For instance, the Scottish Agricultural College study is finding that nitrification inhibitors applied to pasture can reduce NO₂ emissions by 60 to 70%.

• Make more milk with fewer cows. As productivity per cow improves, carbon dioxide (C0₂) equivalents per kilogram of milk are reduced, said Torsten Hemme, economist for the International Farm Comparison Network (IFCN), which maintains a database to compare dairy farming systems in 38 countries. The European Union and the United States, with high-production, high-input dairies, have high production costs but smaller carbon footprints, compared to smaller-scale producers in many developing countries.

Hemme compared the carbon footprints of farms in six countries, measured in kilograms of CO₂ per kilograms of milk produced. The smallest footprint was made by large California dairies; the largest, by Peru’s small farmers.    
  “To manage the carbon footprint is easy; to manage cost of production is easy, too,” Hemme said. “But to do both is not so easy.
     “And then where does sustainability come in? It’s naïve to choose one dairy farming system. There’s a big need to put a package together that suits the local situation – every region has to do its own homework.”

• Tillage practices such as no-till.

• Precision feeding of livestock to cut nutrient loss.

• Better use of manure as fertilizer. However, that can do little to mitigate climate change on a global level, said Maggie Gill, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The largest potential comes from managing crop and pastureland, especially in countries in Asia and Africa. Methane and carbon emissions from livestock and their manure have a much lower opportunity for mitigation, Gill said.

• Move dairy farming from marginal areas to ones with better-suited climates and terrain. In Saudi Arabia, where wheat production has already been phased out because of water shortage, the dairy industry is likely to go next, said Russel Wards, manager of Al-Safi Dairy, which has 17,000 cows. The country is looking to invest dairy money in neighboring countries like Algeria and Sudan, he said.

Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, may want to repopulate once-heavy dairy areas with farms again to better distribute nutrients and save on transportation costs.

But Western United Dairymen’s Paul Martin pointed out that the relocation has been dairy’s traditional solution to regulatory and environmental pressure. A good example is dairies in California’s Central Valley, some of which have moved several times.  That won’t work anymore, he said. “ I think we’ve got to get out of the mindset of running away from our problems and instead concentrate on new technology.”

     IDF and the summit’s sponsors, DairyCo, a British dairy organization, and Swedish milking equipment manufacturer DeLaval, set up a website to provide a forum for climate change. The website is www.sustainabledairyfarming.com.