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Description: Join us for a free Webinar at 1:15 Eastern Time, 12:15 pm Central, 11:15 am Mountain, 10:15 am Pacific)
Presenter: Dr. Charles Benbrook, The Organic Center
Reserve your Webinar Seat Now at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/256027665
About the Webinar
One study concludes that high-producing Holsteins on rbST have a lighter environmental footprint than cows on organic dairy farms, while other studies have reached the opposite conclusion. What gives?
The Organic Center has developed an Excel-based simulation model that estimates the environmental impacts of different dairy management systems. The "Shades of Green" (SOG) dairy farm calculator shows clearly why different studies can and have reached totally opposite conclusions after analyzing essentially the same things.
The SOG calculator is freely accessible (www.organic-center.org/SOG_home), along with a 100-page user manual that includes documentation of its equations and data sources. The manual suggests how to apply the calculator to a given farm, set of farms, or a cluster of changes in a dairy farm management system. The first application of SOG calculates and compares the environmental footprint of two typical, representative conventional dairy farms and two organic farms. The results are summarized in the November 2010 TOC report “A Dairy Farm’s Footprint: Evaluating the Impacts of Conventional and Organic Farming Systems.”
This webinar will cover the nuts and bolts of the SOG calculator and the results of its first application. Dr. Charles Benbrook, TOC’s chief scientist, will present the webinar. Benbrook led the 14-person team that co-authored the new report and helped design and parameterize the calculator.
The SOG calculator quantifies the impacts of dairy farm systems on milk and meat production and gross farm revenue, milk nutritional quality, land use, fertilizer and pesticide use, manure and nutrient wastes generated, and methane emissions. A careful review of previously developed environmental footprint models led to the realization that results have been based on “a year in the life of a cow,” rather than the cow’s productive life which have excluded consideration of the impacts of dairy farm management systems on cow health and longevity, soil quality and productivity, and overall, lifelong economic returns to a lactating cow. Two major conclusions are reached and will be discussed:
* Milk nutritional quality varies greatly, and must be taken into account to avoid bias against grass-based systems and cows other than Holsteins; and
* Cow health and longevity, and in particular, reproductive performance, are critical variables in determining a dairy farm’s environmental footprint.
The Center is actively recruiting dairy farm management specialists to work with farmers in applying the SOG calculator on dairy farms around the country, and is also hoping to forge new partnerships with research teams working to sharpen the analytical tools accessible to refine future estimates of a dairy farm’s footprint.
