Environmental Impact of Dairy Farming

All food production comes with an environmental footprint. That's why dairy farmers are working every day to reduce that footprint in a number of different ways, including recycling, finding new renewable energy sources, reducing and repurposing waste, and upcycling nutritious ingredients for the cows' diets. This kind of sustainable modernization is the perfect example of why a dairy farmer is much more than a farmer – they're engineers, nutritionists, environmentalists and everything in between. 

Dairy Production and the Environment

Given how important dairy is to the American diet, producing dairy has a surprisingly small impact on the environment. In 2008, the U.S. dairy industry was the first in the food agricultural sector to conduct a full life cycle assessment at a national scale. From that LCA, which focused on fluid milk, it was estimated that U.S. dairy accounts for approximately 2% of total GHG emissions, 5.1% of water use and 3.7% of U.S. farmland. Thanks to increasingly modern and innovative dairy farming practices, the environmental impact of producing a gallon of milk in 2017 shrunk significantly, requiring 30% less water, 21% less land and a 19% smaller carbon footprint than it did in 2007. That’s the same as the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by half a million acres of U.S. forest.

Dairy Farmers Mitigating Methane Emissions 

Dairy farmers have long been lessening the environmental impact of dairy farming, tending to their animals and managing their land, air, and water resources. They’re our planet’s natural innovators. Sure, we’ve made progress, but we’re not stopping there. For instance, methane presents a greater risk in the near term for atmospheric warming when compared to other GHGs, but it has a much shorter lifespan. That’s why we’re seizing the moment to address methane from cow burps and manure to gain significant climate benefits. Some of the most promising solutions are linked to a cow’s diet. Digesters and renewable natural gas offer one of the more established ways to address GHG emissions related to manure management. And feed production research examines strategies and practices in field that will help to reduce the release of, and help sequester, GHGs.

Dairy cows are doing their part to keep waste out of landfills, another way to help mitigate methane emissions. Every day cows eat an estimated 26.5 pounds of things like cottonseed and distillers’ grains, and one third of a cow’s diet – representing anywhere from 32 million to 41 million metric tons nationally – consists of a byproduct from crop or food company production (think almond hulls or citrus peels). That’s another reason why cows are an important part of the conversation when it comes to climate change.