A Global Review of Monitoring, Modeling, and Analyses of Water Demand in Dairy Farming

Abstract

The production of milk must be balanced with the sustainable consumption of water resources to ensure the future sustainability of the global dairy industry. Thus, this review article aimed to collate and summarize the literature in the dairy water-usage domain. While green water use (e.g., rainfall) was found to be largest category of water use on both stall and pasture-based dairy farms, on-farm blue water (i.e., freshwater) may be much more susceptible to local water shortages due to the nature of its localized supply through rivers, lakes, or groundwater aquifers. Research related to freshwater use on dairy farms has focused on monitoring, modeling, and analyzing the parlor water use and free water intake of dairy cows. Parlor water use depends upon factors related to milk precooling, farm size, milking systems, farming systems, and washing practices. Dry matter intake is a prominent variable in explaining free water intake variability; however, due to the unavailability of accurate data, some studies have reported moving away from dry matter intake at the expense of prediction accuracy. Machine-learning algorithms have been shown to improve dairy water-prediction accuracy by 23%, which may allow for coarse model inputs without reducing accuracy. Accurate models of on-farm water use allow for an increased number of dairy farms to be used in water footprinting studies, as the need for physical metering equipment is mitigated.

Contamination of Groundwater Resources and its Impact on Milk Productivity and Efficiency of Dairy Farms: An Evidence from Punjab, Pakistan

“…Farmers have livestock to compensate for the crop losses. But the dairy sector is also badly affected by poor groundwater quality (Shine et al, 2020). The sewerage system is absent in many villages of the study area and groundwater quality is highly variable.…”

Water-Energy-Food nexus index proposal as a sustainability criterion on dairy farms

“…declarations of dairy products, apart from promotes the development of green policies (Gollnow et al, 2014). As for water use (WF), this is mainly related to the use of green water (i.e., rainwater), although large amounts of blue water from rivers, lakes or aquifers is also needed, which often leads to local water shortages during periods of drought (Shine et al, 2020). Additionally, achieving optimal levels of energy efficiency is also a vital environmental issue, since a significant share of GHG emissions come from the energy consumption (EF) through two sources: direct consumption in the farm (lighting, cooling, automatic milking systems, among others), and indirect demand from the production of consumables such as cleaning agents or animal feed (Todde et al, 2017).…”

Monitoring of water amount going to manure removal system from milking parlour

“…The study [16] compares the need for cleaning water per kg of milk. This indicator strongly depends on the milk performance of cows and, probably, is more acceptable in economic calculations.…”