Will expansion of dairy farming have a negative impact on the environment?

With the growing global demand for high-quality dairy produce, Ireland has committed to delivering a 50 % increase in dairy production before the year 2020. The Sustainable Dairy Assurance Scheme has been established to ensure that expansion can proceed without having a negative impact on the environment. The scheme is an independently verified and internationally accredited programme, which calculates the greenhouse gas emissions of each participating dairy farm.

It uses the ‘Carbon Navigator Tool’ to provide detailed feedback to each farmer helping them to improve their performance in relation to the length of the grazing season, the economic breeding index (genetic testing), nitrogen efficiency, manure management and energy efficiency. Improvements in these areas can contribute to a reduction in the farm’s carbon footprint. In addition, Dairy Sustainability Ireland was launched in 2017, as an initiative to help farmers meet environmental targets into the future.

Extra Information:

The Sustainable Dairy Assurance Standard (SDAS) is the only national sustainability and quality assurance scheme in operation in the world for dairy farms. It was the first scheme, of its kind to attain international accreditation to ISO 17065.

The main aims of the SDAS are to demonstrate to dairy customers that milk is produced sustainably under an accredited scheme, to provide a uniform mechanism for recording and monitoring of dairy farm quality assurance criteria and sustainability criteria of the farm, to set out the criteria for best practice in Irish dairy farming and to provide an on-going means of demonstrating best practice at producer level. Through a system of auditing and providing feedback at regular intervals it is intended to drive improvements in farm sustainability from an environmental, economic and social perspective.