Dairy: Environment

From soil health to slurry storage, our resources can help you to make your business more productive, and more profitable, while lowering your carbon emissions and impact on the environment.  

Dairy Roadmap

Founded in 2008, The Dairy Roadmap acts as a cross-industry approach to the setting of targets and driving progress on the environmental ambitions and commitments made by the UK dairy sector. Its aim is simple - to improve the environmental sustainability of the UK dairy sector whilst ensuring the continued prosperity of the industry, and the provision of safe, affordable, nutritious and sustainable produce for years to come.

Dairy producers have achieved improvements across a wide range of targets since 2015:

• 24% decline in GHG emissions associated with milk production
• 43% of dairy farmers implement or use renewable energy
• 78% of farmers implement water efficiency measures
• 73% of dairy farms implemented nutrient management plans

Genetics

We launched two new genetic indexes to help farmers breed more environmentally friendly cows: EnviroCow and Feed Advantage.

EnviroCow reflects the important role genetics and breeding play in improving the environmental efficiency of milk production. Incorporating cow lifespan, milk production, fertility and the new Feed Advantage index, EnviroCow is one of the first genetic indexes in the world to focus solely on breeding cows for their environmental credentials.

EnviroCow will be expressed on a scale of about -3 to +3, where the highest positive figures are achieved by bulls which transmit the best environmental credentials to their daughters. These will be cows which are predicted to create the least GHG emissions in their lifetimes for each kilogram of solids-corrected milk they produce.

Feed Advantage, incorporated in EnviroCow, helps dairy producers identify bulls with the greatest tendency to transmit good feed conversion on to their daughters. It is expressed as a Predicted Transmitting Ability (PTA) in kilograms of dry matter intake saved during each lactation.

Challenging Misinformation

Our Media and PR team, with the support of internal and industry stakeholders, work to challenge misinformation in the press, social media, and advertising, as well as encouraging balanced reporting through sharing facts about British agriculture and the challenges of sustainable food production. .