Dairy production is a key backbone of European and Latin American agriculture but heavily relies on external inputs, lacking resilience and circularity. When dairy production is recoupled with grasslands and diversified crops, it relies more on on-farm produced feed and provides valuable ecosystem services.
The aim of the DairyMix platform is to define region-specific concepts for sustainable and circular crop-forestry-livestock systems for dairy production, providing the dairy sector with a long-lasting multi-actor knowledge hub.
- To assess the environmental performance of a wide range of dairy farms in Argentina, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Poland, Life Cycle Assessment was carried out and integrated in a multicriteria assessment with economic and social sustainability indicators;
- A crop model was used to assess different different circular farming systems scenarios for dairy production;
- A whole-farm model was used to assess the effects of different GHG and N mitigation measures and their combinations;
- An Online Tool for monitoring Indoor barn Climate and Emissions (OTICE) was developed and tested in different case study barns.
In contrast to “one-fit-all” solutions, the DairyMix platform presents a range of options for the sustainability of farming systems for dairy production, favouring the adoption of informed decisions on environmental, economic and social sustainability for circular and integrated crop-forestry-livestock systems.