News

The annual Dairy Sustainability Alliance Spring meeting drew in over 260 dairy value chain partners, including farmers, to discuss shared priorities and progress. Among the various discussion topics of health and nutrition, on farm practicality and economic viability, measuring progress, and understanding farmers’ perspectives, the overall message remained the same — what makes the dairy industry stand out from others is its shared responsibility and aligned execution to power its momentum.

Dairy Soil & Water Regeneration researcher, Dr. Mara Cloutier of the Soil Health Institute, and Wisconsin dairy farmer participant, Jack Herricks, sit down with Stephanie Hoff of the Mid-West Farm Report to discuss the project’s collaboration with commercial dairy farms in key dairy states across the country to collect real-world data. This collected data, including that on Herricks’ farm, was crucial in the project’s benchmarking campaign to quantify the current state of soil health and carbon stock of soils that receive dairy manure and provide forages for dairies.

Composted manure can be used as a valuable soil amendment, or when dry enough, an economical bedding material for dairy cows. When composting, the basic principles can often be overlooked, but they are crucial to proper management. An adequate balance of moisture, carbon to nitrogen ratio, temperature, size, and oxygen levels allow for optimal microbial activity and a mature compost product.

The Dairy Alliance recently launched its “Got Clean Water” campaign for the month of April, Earth month. This initiative highlights how dairy farmers, industry partners, and environmental organizations work together to protect water quality through conservation practice implementation. Combining public and private efforts focused on practice improvements such as enhanced manure storage and field conservation practices help to reduce runoff and protecting local waterways while improving operational efficiencies.

In regions with limited water supply, farmers are looking for forage solutions that perform well in dry conditions and poor soils. Generally requiring less water than corn, sorghum silage can replace a portion of corn silage in a ration while maintaining milk production, so long it is balanced correctly. While not a full replacement for corn silage, sorghum can be a sustainable option in the forage toolbox.

Manure can be a challenging liability, but with proper handling and management, it can be a vital source of nutrients and cost savings. Each farm is different and there is no one correct way to handle manure, but when improvements are made to manure management systems to treat manure as a fertilizer rather than a waste product, it provides biological, economic, and social benefits to producers and their surrounding environments.

Dairy Management Inc. has launched its new Funding Opportunities Database, an online tool dedicated to helping farmers and their advisors search for grants and other funding opportunities focused on conservation projects and on-farm improvements. Tailored to the complex nature of dairy farms, the database helps farms overcome the hurdle of finding the right funding source to implement new practices and technologies.

Data collected in the Dairy Soil & Water Regeneration (DSWR) project is helping farmers make confident decisions about sustainable field practices and driving improvements in modeling for soil carbon, greenhouse gas flux, and hydrology. Cara Mathers, a research soil scientist at the Soil Health Institute, a key partner in DSWR, shared insights into the modeling effort.

A new bill may help make the permitting process for the Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP) easier to award grants to eligible projects. Awarding $113 million since 2017, AMMP has assisted the implementation of 172 projects proven to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from manure.

Josh Mirabella, UW-Madison graduate student, set up a sub-experiment within an established Dairy Soil & Water Regeneration project site with a goal of understanding whether manure products could improve the retention of nitrogen fertilizer when both were applied to corn silage. This demonstrates how DSWR can be used to spark additional questions and broaden the impact of the research.