Developing “Mitigation Engine”, a tool to quantify the impacts of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies in the dairy farming system
The livestock sector plays a significant role in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Mitigating GHG emissions in the dairy sector is an imperative environmental and sustainability challenge. Dairy production, while providing essential nutrition globally, is associated with significant emissions of methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) carbon dioxide (CO2) from enteric fermentation, manure management, and feed production. Efforts to mitigate the impact of livestock on GHG emissions include many practices which aim to reduce emissions from the livestock sector and mitigate its contribution to climate change. There are many challenges that make the quantification of mitigation strategies more complicated:
- Dairy is a complex production system and any small change in the production factors might have an impact on other production factors and the productivity of the whole dairy farm.
- There are synergies and tradeoffs between the mitigation strategies which makes quantification of GHG reduction potential more complicated.
- The potential for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, as documented in the literature, is contingent on particular circumstances and, consequently, may differ from one farm to another.
In this situation, we need a decision-supporting tool that can consider all consequences based on the life cycle assessment approach. Wageningen Livestock Research together with Unilever started a project to develop a decision support tool that makes it possible to quantify the impacts of various mitigation strategies for the dairy sector. Together with my colleague Theun Vellinga we worked on this idea and developed Mitigation Engine in which the GHG reduction potential and the cost-effectiveness of mitigation strategies can be quantified.
Various measures were considered in Mitigation Engine such as feeding-related measures (application of feed additives (Bovaer and SilvAir), grazing, compound feed adjustment, diet adjustment), animal management-related measures (increasing longevity, increasing productivity (milk per animal), improving animal health), manure management-related measures (regular emptying of manure storage, primary separation, digester), Land management-related measures (sowing clover on grasslands, grassland management, rotation of grass-maize, less application of mineral fertilizers, nitrogen fertilizer with a low carbon footprint, increasing grass and maize yield, use of diesel fuel with a low carbon footprint), energy-related measures (production and use of renewable energies, reduction of energy losses).
The advantages of Mitigation Engine are:
- Farm-specific model which is connected to a monitoring tool (KLW or ANCA)
- Metamodel which uses results of other models in a simplified form
- Considers the interactions
- Users can see the impacts of measures and play with the tool
- Updatable easily
- User-friendliness
Mitigation Engine is under testing and improvement in “Low Carbon Dairy: working together on a 50% reduction of the footprint of milk” project where Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s and CONO Cheesemakers, Nestlé, Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods, Agrifirm, ForFarmers and De Heus and Duynie (supplier of co-products), Lely (robots and data systems for dairy farms), and Rabobank are also participating.
If you are interested in knowing more about Mitigation Engine, please contact: hassan.pishgarkomleh@wur.nl