.png)
Midwest Dairy Organization Event Focused on Green Issues
Critics of livestock farming cite methane emissions from cattle as a major contributor to global climate change. Dairy farmers and advocates contend that they are getting a bad rap, citing studies showing that dairy cows contribute relatively minor amounts of greenhouse gas.
Concerns about being tarred by opponents of cattle raising have spurred many dairy farmers and their industry organizations to amp up their efforts on sustainability. Nearly all U.S. dairy farms participate in the FARM program – FARM standing for Farmers Assuring Responsible Management – which provides science-based standards and verifications in the areas of Animal Care, Antibiotic Stewardship, Biosecurity, Environmental Stewardship, and Workforce Development.
Also playing a role are regional organizations such as Midwest Dairy, which is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota and represents 10 states. Midwest Dairy has held a series of events to promote sustainability consciousness in the dairy sector, including a forum that I attended a few weeks ago. The event was held at Herban Produce, an urban produce farm, run by small farmer advocate Alicia Nesbary-Moore, that is located in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood.
The forum was led off by Dakota Cowger, a dairy farmer from Peotone, Illinois, located about 40 miles south of Chicago. (My wife Barb grew up on a farm in that town.) Dakota noted that he teaches agriculture at Peotone High School, and he was accompanied at the event by several young members of that community’s 4-H program.
A graduate of Midwest Dairy’s Dairy Experience and Agricultural Leadership (DEAL) program, Dakota gave a primer about the organization’s purposes:
Midwest Dairy is a part of the national Checkoff Program. What that means is, for every so much milk that we produce on the farm, a tiny bit of the check that we get goes to the Checkoff. This helps hold events like this that can help educate the general public. Midwest Dairy has a 10-state region and represents 4,000 dairy farmers in this 10-state region. We produce 24 million tons of milk annually or 10 percent of the total U.S. milk production. There are 380 dairy herds here in Illinois.
Dakota handed off to Alicia Nesbary-Moore, the evening’s host. Alicia explained that her small urban farm grows many varieties of produce (no livestock). She said the farm was started in 2016 to help restore economic energy in the under-resourced East Garfield Park neighborhood, noting that the farm site had stood empty since the destructive riots that followed the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In Memphis, Tennessee.
“It's women-run,” Alicia said. “We also employ a lot of people from the community.”
The next segment featured a presentation on dairy and sustainability by Dr. Stephanie Masiello Schuette, Vice President, Environmental Research Affairs at Dairy Management Inc.
Stephanie described the goals of a sustainable food system as closing product yield gaps, closing nutrient gaps, ensuring a high-quality diet, closing access gaps and reducing the environmental footprint of the system. “Dairy plays a role in each pillar,’ she continued. "Dairy is affordable and accessible, makes significant contributions of nutrients, supports livelihoods of over a billion people worldwide, and also targets efficiencies in feed, methane, manure and energy.”
Pushing back against critics who contend that dairy cows are responsible for a major amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Stephanie pointed to a 2020 modeling study at Virginia Tech that showed getting rid of dairy cattle would result in a minuscule GHG reduction, while exacerbating nutrition gaps around the world.
She cited another study that compared dairy farming in 2017 to that in 2007, and it found that to produce the same amount of milk, the dairy industry used about 17.3 percent less feed, almost 21 percent less land, 25 percent fewer cows, and almost 31 percent less water, and it generated about 19 percent less GHG emissions.
Stephanie then credited dairy farmers' use of upcycled waste products from the human food system for animal feed, thus reducing waste. “Things like citrus peels, almond hulls, distillers’ grain, things that we're not going to use for food, are quite nutritious for our cows,” she said.
The presentation was capped by Lorilee Schultz, who described how she and her family put sustainability into practice with their 60-cow herd at their Mil-R-Mor Farm, located west of Rockford in north-central Illinois.
Lorilee is a fourth-generation farmer and she said she gets her interest in sustainability naturally. She said one of her grandmothers “was always very passionate about conservation. She really wanted to study wildlife ecology when she was a teenager, and her dad told her that girls don't go to college, so unfortunately, she did not have that opportunity. But she kept sustainability as a lifelong passion, and at her passing, she actually donated the wetlands that were on her property to McHenry County, so it will forever be a preserved area for wildlife, and wetlands are such an important part of maintaining our water system.”
Her other grandmother foraged for medicinal plants when growing up in Quebec, which Lorilee said “instilled the importance of preserving our biodiversity on our farm.”
She said their practices on the farm lend themselves to biodiversity, maintaining clean water, and soil conservation in their crop fields and pastures. She mentioned a phrase – carbon sequestration – that is dear to practitioners and advocates of regenerative agriculture, adding that she and her family were “recognizing that our weather patterns are changing as a result of global warming, and just playing our part in doing what we can to help correct that.”
They have planted 250 trees on the farm over the past eight years, which she described as great ways to capture carbon and provide wildlife habitat. “I love watching the birds on our farm, and it's been interesting to kind of see the different birds that we've attracted this last year,” she said. “We had a family of Sandhill cranes in our corn field.”
In another important step, the farm is deploying more cover crops, which an increasing number of farmers and agronomists view as crucial to maintaining and improving soil health. “We've already seen some really good benefits,” Lorilee said. “One, they help keep that soil where it is. And another thing, we're in our field several times a year, if we're doing hay or corn silage and we're driving heavy equipment over the field, the cover crops can also kind of help break up that soil and reduce the soil compaction.”
She continued to describe other measures they are taking on the farm, including buffer strips of vegetation to slow the flow of water and diminish nutrient runoff, planting native plants and legumes, and creating an acre of pollinator habitat.
The event concluded with a presentation by registered dietician Jillian Quainoo, who discussed the nutritional benefits of dairy and how people can work around lactose intolerance issues.
Not every dairy farm goes as far as Mil-R-Mor on sustainability, but the general higher priority many farmers are giving to sustainable practices is encouraging. Midwest Dairy deserves a shoutout for its efforts to bring this to public attention.
Comments