How can farming intensification affect the environmental impact of milk production?

Abstract

The intensification process of the livestock sector has been characterized in recent decades by increasing output of product per hectare, increasing stocking rate, including more concentrated feed in the diet, and improving the genetic merit of the breeds. In dairy farming, the effects of intensification on the environmental impact of milk production are not completely clarified. The aim of the current study was to assess the environmental impacts of dairy production by a life cycle approach and to identify relations between farming intensity and environmental performances expressed on milk and land units. A group of 28 dairy farms located in northern Italy was involved in the study; data collected during personal interviews of farmers were analyzed to estimate emissions (global warming potential, acidification, and eutrophication potentials) and nonrenewable source consumption (energy and land use). The environmental impacts of milk production obtained from the life cycle assessment were similar to those of other recent studies and showed high variability among the farms. From a cluster analysis, 3 groups of farms were identified, characterized by different levels of production intensity. Clusters of farms showed similar environmental performances on product basis, despite important differences in terms of intensification level, management, and structural characteristics. Our study pointed out that, from a product perspective, the most environmentally friendly way to produce milk is not clearly identifiable. However, the principal component analysis showed that some characteristics related to farming intensification, such as milk production per cow, dairy efficiency, and stocking density, were negatively related to the impacts per kilogram of product, suggesting a role of these factors in the mitigation strategy of environmental burden of milk production on a global scale. Considering the environmental burden on a local perspective, the impacts per hectare were positively associated with the intensification level.

An approach to holistically assess (dairy) farm eco-efficiency by combining Life Cycle Analysis with Data Envelopment Analysis models and methodologies

“…Finally, note that for both systems the largest slack was eutrophication, as opposed to the relatively low global warming potential slacks. This agrees with the findings of Bava et al (2014) that livestock systems are often responsible for important local EIs.…”

“…Casey and Holden, 2005;van Calker et al, 2008;Basset-Mens et al, 2009;Guerci et al, 2013;Bava et al, 2014). To calculate the EIs dairy studies (including the aforementioned) are increasingly using Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), an internationally standardized method for estimating the EIs of agricultural products from a global perspective (Bava et al, 2014).…”

“…Others have examined the relationships between eco-efficiency ratios and related factors (e.g. farming intensity, farm self-sufficiency) by employing multivariate methods such as regression (Casey and Holden, 2005) and principal component analysis (Bava et al, 2014). Other studies have focussed on expressing the relative importance of several eco-efficiency indicators based on different stakeholder weighting schemes (see van Calker et al, 2008).…”

Factors Affecting Global versus Local Environmental and Economic Performance of Dairying: A Case Study of Swiss Mountain Farms

“…To the best of our knowledge, the small sample size problem and its related limitations in terms of statistical approach occur in all existing similar LCA-based investigations, most of which rely on fewer than 30 (and even quite often fewer than 10) observations (see for instance Cedeberg et al [10], Haas et al [11], Thomassen et al [13], Bava et al [15], Battini et al [16]). We are fully aware that such sample sizes are suboptimal from a statistical point of view.…”

“…Until now, most LCA-based studies investigating the potential factors of environmental performance in dairy farming have focused on the analysis of the effect of production form (organic vs. conventional, e.g., [10][11][12][13]) or of production intensity (see, for example, [11,[14][15][16][17]) on farm environmental performance. When investigating the effects of different factors on farm environmental performance, none of these studies distinguished between the global and local environmental performance of a farm as defined by Repar et al [7].…”