More than 14.5 Billion of $ were spent in US by Federal R&D authority for 2011 for Climate Change. Current focus of animal scientists is to identify the most viable solutions to improve farm profitability and milk production while minimizing the environmental impact of livestock. The main objective of this paper was to use the System Dynamics methodology to: 1) model the importance of the milk production improvement to reduce greenhouses emissions in the dairy cattle sector, and 2) focus a viable policy to minimize the dairy environmental impact. The model consisted of 6 sub-models, as follows: (A) human population and milk market; (B) cow population; (C) milk production; (D) energy and feed requirements by the animals; (E) economics; and (F) potential environmental impacts and government policy; the last sub-model was aimed to encourage and strengthen the reduction of GHG emissions in dairy cattle farms by improving the milk production per cow. Considering the simulated scenarios, the carbon footprint of the milk (expressed as kg of CO_2 equivalents emitted per kg of milk), decreased proportionally to the milk production per cow; while the total amount of emissions was highest in the scenarios with highest milk production rate. Policies oriented to improve the milk production per cow per year stimulated the milk consumption rate and reduced the carbon footprint of milk. Simulated scenarios showed that to reach environmental goals, governmental policies should be oriented to stimulate dairy farm productivity and taking advantages from minimizing resource utilization and farm inefficiencies.
展开▼
