We speak to Kite Consulting’s Emma McAvoy to find out how producers can reduce their carbon footprint through a whole-farm approach…
Dairy producers leverage a wide toolset to tackle farm emissions – from improving soils to managing manure; reducing reliance on chemical fertilizers and improving general animal health to boost productivity.
But where should one begin if they want to tackle carbon emissions?
“Looking at carbon specifically, there’s still a huge amount of easy wins that are going to improve profitability,” McAvoy told us. “Fertility, general health, using genomic testing, improving per-cow productivity to generate better income with fewer inputs. All of this is going to help with the environmental sustainability points as well.”
Efficiency gains and emissions reductions
The UK industry has reduced its environmental impact in both total emissions terms (down 16.1% (1.12Mt CO2eq) between 1990 and 2020) and intensity terms (by 12.8% based on carbon equivalence per unit of milk produced, g/kg). At the same time, milk production per cow has increased by 59% while the UK herd size has shrunk by 35% between 1990 and 2020.
Source: Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Livestock (CIEL) report Net Zero and Livestock: How Farmers Can Reduce Emissions
She told us farmers are increasingly reaching out for advice and to find out what they can do to gain a competitive edge – and staying ahead of the curve is a major motivation for dairies.
“The key driver on a farm level still is improving one’s business,” she told us. “We’re seeing more and more retailers and processors putting in measures and schemes to try and influence those changes on farms. There are two sides of it, in a way: there’s ‘the carrot’ - it makes business sense to improve - and then there’s ‘the stick’ coming from retailers and processors.”
So what steps should farmers begin with?
“Definitely with a carbon audit,” McAvoy told us. “If you don’t measure, you can’t manage – and carbon is very measurable. We can do an annual audit. We can take that on a regular basis, and so on.”
Most British dairies have had a carbon audit, McAvoy estimates, through a mix of processor- and industry-led initiatives. “We’ve largely crossed that hurdle that most farms now have a carbon audit done. But it’s another matter how many producers read [their audit] and understand it, and that’s the next step.”
Soil health is another major area to invest in, we were told. “Everything does start with the soil,” the consultant said. “If you’ve got resilient soils, they hold more carbon, you’re producing more crops and holding more water as well.”
And nutrition is becoming increasingly important and precision-driven. “Nutrition companies are now starting to incorporate carbon footprints into rationing programs,” McAvoy told us. “We are some way off, but I think in the fairly near future – in the next couple of years, anyway – we’ll start to see nutritionists on farm being able to estimate the cost of your herd’s diet, what that diet is going to achieve in efficiency terms but also what the carbon footprint associated with this would be.
“That, in turn, should provide farmers with the information required to make on-the-spot decisions about what ration they should be using and how that would influence their farm’s carbon footprint.”
Money talks
But sustainability improvements are costly – from trialing methane-reducing feed additives to investing in slurry storage improvements, producers may need more than the carrot and stick approach.
“Currently, if the carbon footprint of one diet was substantially higher than another, but the other was cheaper, it’s likely that producers would still opt for the cheaper one, even if the carbon footprint associated with it is higher.”
And while reducing reliance on synthetic fertilizer is important, it’s equally key to not sacrifice crop cover. “Just reducing your fertilizer alone isn’t necessarily going to make you more efficient,” as McAvoy explained. “For example, if it impacts productivity, you need to reduce your fertilizer while using more organic additions such as manure, so you don’t negatively impact your soil. There needs to be a balance of different elements, a whole-farm approach of sorts.”
Carrying out slurry storage improvements can also be particularly costly – Kite estimates an average farm can be set back around £405,000 per year – but is needed to offset the damaging impact of climate change. In its report The Cost of Climate Resilience, Kite estimates that two thirds of British farmers have less than 6 months of slurry storage and only 15% of UK dairy farms have 8 or more months slurry storage available (local regulations mandate a minimum of 4 months of slurry storage availability, but the UK’s increasingly wet climate suggests more than that is needed to withstand the impact of climate change, according to the report).
Implementing new technologies such as feed additives has also become ridden with pitfalls in the UK, where a large-scale trial of feed additive Bovaer sparked controversy among consumers and industry stakeholders alike. And leveraging the feed additive too comes at a price, of around £60-70 per cow per year, according to dsm-firmenich.
McAvoy told us only time would tell how this and other similar technologies would fare as sustainable solutions, but it’s clear that processors are facing ‘massive costs’ to trial them now.
“It’s very difficult to predict now what would be viable and what won’t be in years’ time; that’s something we’re going to see a lot more of over the next 5-10 years.
“But I think now producers need to focus on the win-wins and that whole-farm approach, and not getting too caught up in a ‘carbon tunnel vision’.
“For example, looking at soils, that’s a win-win; improving infrastructure to be able to deal with heat is another. There’s a lot of investment involved in different areas.
“At the end of the day, sustainability includes business sustainability. You need to be efficient and productive to be sustainable in the first place.
“But having the resources, infrastructure, and the soils, it all helps from a climate resilience perspective as well.
“Because climate change does impact farmers directly; and a lot of that whole-farm approach can help improve resilience.”