Dairy Carbon Footprint

image by John Weber for WSJ

A shout-out to friends/colleagues at the School of Natural Resouces & Environment whose life cycle analysis to establish a comprehensive carbon footprint of a dairy operation was mentioned in this Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints article recently in the Wall Street Journal.

Aurora Dairy Corp.'s Aurora Organic Dairy, a small organic-milk producer based in Boulder, Colo., is finishing a more-complete study of the carbon footprint of its milk. Its study, done by researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems, attempts to include emissions all the way from growing the cattle feed to refrigerating the processed milk in the store. The preliminary findings are that producing a half-gallon of Aurora's milk generates the equivalent of 7.2 pounds of carbon dioxide. That's essentially the same amount as the National Dairy Holdings study concluded is produced by an entire gallon of National Dairy Holdings' milk. But the National Dairy Holdings study left out much of the process that the Aurora study included.

Both studies found that the single biggest chunk of emissions from milk production comes from all that action in the cow's gut. Now, the U.S. dairy industry's main trade group, Dairy Management Inc., is launching yet another study of milk's carbon footprint. It plans a complete measurement akin to Aurora Organic Dairy's.