Milking it: critics take aim at new environmental guidelines for dairy industry

The US dairy industry is outlining ways ranchers and producers can reduce their environmental impact. But do the new guidelines go far enough?
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rian Medeiros generally keeps the operation at Medeiros & Son simple and traditional. The Central California farm’s 2,500 cows get milked three times a day and the resulting milk is shipped to area processors and turned into cheese and butter.
“We’re not the newest, most fandangled-type facility,” said Medeiros, a second-generation dairy farmer.
In recent years, some new farming technology has crept in, with the goal of making farms more sustainable. Medeiros installed GPS devices on tractors to make sure they’re not covering unnecessary ground. The milking pumps have new, more efficient drives. And this year, the farm erected a 1-megawatt solar power system that will provide about 85% of the farm’s energy needs.
Medeiros is just one farmer in a $36bn industry that is attempting to move in a more sustainable direction. To that end, Innovation Center for US Dairy, an industry group representing about 80% of the dairy production in the US, has released proposed updates to its Stewardship and Sustainability Guide for US Dairy, a set of voluntary sustainability metrics for dairy farm operations and producers that aim to help the industry respond to the environmental need and consumer demand for more sustainable practices.
The Innovation Center was founded in 2008 with the goal of creating a shared sustainability vision for the dairy industry. It released the first version of its sustainability standards in 2013. This version, still in effect today, includes guidelines for measuring and communicating energy use, greenhouse gas impact and animal care on the farm level. At the producer level, the guidelines suggest best practices for water use and efficiency, employee benefits and health and community engagement, as well as energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
The new version, which is open to comment until 10 March, adds metrics for water use and quality, soil quality, biodiversity, waste management and feed management to the on-farm practices section. For producers, new metrics on waste management and air quality have been added.
“There’s the potential here for a very large percentage of the dairy industry to be using these to communicate their sustainability and environmental stewardship goals,” said Chad Frahm, senior vice president of sustainability at the Innovation Center.
However, while many in the dairy industry are excited about the new guidelines, voices in the sustainability field question whether voluntary measures have the power to effect needed change.
“It really all depends on what those standards are and the situation surrounding those standards,” said Chris Hunt, special advisor on food and agriculture for theGrace Communications Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit focused on food and environmental issues. “I don’t think voluntary industry guidelines should take the place of regulations.”
According to Frahm, the goal of updating the sustainability standards is twofold. Firstly, the guidelines should give dairy farms and producers a way to quantify their sustainability efforts, helping them better tell the story of their eco-friendly practices to a market that is increasingly concerned with sourcing its food responsibly. Secondly, the standards should help inspire farmers to improve their operations.
“They’ll run through some of the metrics and say, ‘Where do I compare? How do I get better?’” Frahm said.
The project is still in the early stages, he said. Some farmers are just starting to learn about the standards, while others are already implementing them, using the guidelines to assess and report on their sustainability. He hopes, however, that the document will be a catalyst in the industry, creating one set of standards that can be widely agreed upon and adopted.
Already, dairy operations of all types have made moves toward more sustainable operations, some even going beyond what the standards currently outline. The Oregon Dairy in Pennsylvania has installed an anaerobic digester that captures methane from manure and turns it into electricity and heat. The Hilmar Cheese Company’s locations in California and Texas recover almost all of the water removed from milk in the cheese-making process, treat it, and use the resulting water for crop and landscape irrigation.
Some sustainability experts agree that voluntary standards can be effective at improving businesses’ practices, perhaps even more so than regulations. As long as voluntary guidelines include provisions for transparency and accountability, they can be more flexible and encourage greater innovation than enforced regulations can, said Suzy Friedman, director of sustainable agriculture for the Environmental Defense Fund. According to Friedman, laws should always exist to ensure a base level of responsible behavior. However, the structured and often time-consuming process of debating and developing regulations can make the resulting rules restrictive and difficult to change. Voluntary standards, however, can respond more nimbly to changes in market conditions or available technology.

At the same time, Friedman said companies will want to comply with guidelines in order to satisfy a market clamoring for sustainable food options. “I hear routinely from food companies that their consumers are asking them relentlessly, ‘Where is my food coming from, how is it grown, what’s in it?’” she said. “Food companies realize that their economic wellbeing and support from their customers in part depends on their ability to answer those questions.”
Furthermore, those making the rules may not fully understand the industry they are trying to regulate. Medeiros points to the California Air Resources Board’s stated goal of reducing methane emissions by 40% by 2030. Some promising systems exist to recapture the methane given off by manure, he said, but it would not be possible to meet the state goals without also finding a way to reduce enteric methane emissions – essentially, cow belches. And there is not yet any commercially available technology that can achieve that goal, he said.
“The only way to reduce [enteric] methane from a cow is to get rid of the cow,” Medeiros said.
Some sustainability advocates however are not optimistic about the role of voluntary standards, particularly those generated within the industry itself. If one standard comes to dominate an industry, it is far too easy for consumers to assume a product marketed as sustainable is indeed sustainable, without really understanding what practices back up the claim, according to Grace’s Chris Hunt. “There’s definitely a risk of greenwashing happening,” Hunt said.
The livestock industry is already under-regulated, Hunt added. Most operations pack too many animals into too little space, which is bad for both human health and animal welfare, he said. A single cow, he noted, produces 23 times as much waste as one human; an operation with a few thousand cows can generate as much waste as a small city, without the benefit of a sewer system to keep pollution in check. The overuse of antibiotics is also a problem in the industry. Regulations, not voluntary measures, are the best way to handle these issues.
According to Hunt, once an industry produces its own voluntary rules, creating the sense that the problems are being tackled, it can be even harder to convince lawmakers to take action.
“It’s great that the industry is trying to become more responsible,” Hunt said. “But I just think small improvements shouldn’t be presented as the achievement of sustainability.”

 
Source: The Guardian
 

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Así lo expresó Domingo Possetto, secretario de la seccional Rafaela, quien además, afirmó que a los productores «habitualmente los ignoran los gobiernos». Además, reconoció la labor de los empresarios de las firmas locales y aseguró que están «esperanzados» con la negociación entre SanCor y Adecoagro.

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