FORT WAYNE, Ind. – The U.S. dairy industry’s long-term stewardship goals are designed to make it an environmental solution, not an environmental problem, an official with Dairy Management, Inc., told attendees during the recent Tri-State Dairy Nutrition Conference.

The 2050 Environmental Stewardship Goals create “a collective vision, this is where in the future the industry would like to be,” explained Dr. Juan Tricarico, vice president for sustainability research at Dairy Management. “The idea is to come up with this future vision so that we can align resources and test it out and see what we can do in the collective.”

To reach its stewardship objectives, the U.S. dairy industry has committed to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050, he said. It has also committed to optimizing water use while maximizing recycling, and improving water quality by optimizing the utilization of manure and nutrients.

Greenhouse gas neutrality means that “the total balance of greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide) that are released to the atmosphere and the amount of greenhouse gases that are removed from the atmosphere, they balance out,” he stated. “It’s just like balancing a checkbook, but with greenhouse gases.”

Tricarico spoke April 12 during the 30th annual conference in Fort Wayne.

The stewardship goals are a voluntary, stakeholder-aligned initiative to advance sustainability across the industry, he noted. Dairy cooperatives and processors may adopt the commitment. As of September 2021, 35 companies – representing about 75 percent of U.S. milk production – had adopted it.

“It’s about farmer leadership coming together and saying we’re going to voluntarily put together a commitment that is going to allow us to be aligned with our customers so that we can go ahead and speak about stewardship with a common voice,” Tricarico said. “The farmers are driving this process whereby their customers are going to pursue stewardship in a way the farmers are comfortable with.”

The word customer, he added, refers to anyone who comes onto a farm with a truck to pick up raw milk.

The keys to success for the plan are affordability, data and research gaps, and accessibility, he noted. Affordability is important, Tricarico said, because “if there’s no market, no societal will to partake in the cost of reducing climate change, then how is that going to work, because farmers are not going to be able to take in all of the cost.”

More data and research are necessary to better understand the impact of technologies and practices on emissions, water conservation and quality, he said. As for accessibility, it’s important to help those who need to use technologies and practices understand how to do that, Tricarico added.

The U.S. Dairy Net Zero Initiative is designed to help all farmers adopt technologies and practices, he said. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach.

“The idea is that farms of varying sizes, regions and geographies or designs have practices to choose from and they can actually implement them according to their own conditions – what makes sense to them. That’s an important point because we don’t want our customers to tell us how farmers need to farm.”