The LP Approach to Find Sustainable Solutions to Dairy Farm Management

Purpose of this research is to use the LP model to find optimized whole dairy farm planning solutions (WDFPS) with imposed economic-ecological and social constraints of the sustainability. The strategy is elaborated according with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) combined with Whole farm planning (WFP) strategy proposed by the Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model (GLEAM). The LCA is used to identify the emission sources along livestock supply chains, starting from land use, production of feed through to animal production on farm, processing and transportation of products to the retail point, (AA.VVb, FAO report 2019). A number of dedicated dairy farm works have confirmed the validity of this approach by giving evidences of correlations among diet, and components of WDFPS as the dairy cow welfare, crop productivity, soil fertility, GHG emissions and other economic/environmental variables. The methodology proposed by IPCC is used to estimate: (i) the methane emissions caused by the cow’s enteric fermentation and manure; (ii) the N2O direct and indirect emissions, caused by manure production and manure management; (iii) CO2 emission due to the respiration of animals, vegetables and soil. These emissions, having different environmental impacts, are converted into a common CO2 equivalent measure to estimate the carbon footprint caused by the dairy activities. The diet changes in composition obtained by increasing the Mais silage suggest that this crop is able to capture more CO2 than any other crops used for feeding and with costs inferior to other nutritional equivalent crop ingredients. The proposed WDFPS approach was able to simulate the consequences of different environmental policies. The simulations about the emissions priced with a tax equivalent to a market cap and trade suggest the tradeoff between cost and sustainability for optimal milk production as combination among cost, welfare and GHG emission