The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy has announced a partnership with Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy to help dairy producers “reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve water quality and strengthen farm resilience.”

You can listen to an interview with Chris Cook, Head of Enogen, and Liz Hunt, Head of Sustainable & Responsible Business for Syngenta, who explain more about the initiative: Interview with Chris Cook & Liz Hunt, Syngenta

The collaboration aims to develop a replicable program and toolset to scale the adoption of best management practices in feed/forage production and feed efficiency. Since launching last spring, the group has been working with Wisconsin-based dairy farmers who belong to the Foremost Farms USA® dairy cooperative, which has approximately 1,000 member-owners across seven Midwest states, with support from Nestlé. The team is actively working to expand to more states, with the goal of increasing the number of participating farms each year.

This work is part of the U.S. Dairy Net Zero Initiative (NZI), a five-year, collaborative effort launched in 2020, which includes research, on-farm pilots and partner-based strategies to develop a pathway on-farm to reaching the 2050 environmental stewardship goals set by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. NZI seeks to accelerate voluntary action to reduce environmental impacts by making sustainable practices and technologies more accessible and affordable to U.S. dairy farms of all sizes and geographies.

The effort includes opportunities to incorporate hybrid feeds that can improve the digestibility of starch in cattle feed. From a lifecycle analysis perspective, the potential environmental savings and benefits from increasing feed efficiency are significant for climate-impacting greenhouse gas emissions, as well as land, water and energy use.