This advertising content was produced in collaboration between Vox Creative and our sponsor, without involvement from Vox Media editorial staff.
Advertiser Content From
This advertising content was produced in collaboration between Vox Creative and our sponsor, without involvement from Vox Media editorial staff.
Dairy farms are leveling up in the sustainability game
In the race to feed the world, which farming strategy takes the lead?
The US population is expected to grow by 37 million over the next 30 years. That’s a lot of people to feed considering farmers are only 1% of the population. And with climate change it’s only going to get harder as temperatures rise, farmlands shrink, and wells dry up.
“You can’t continue to produce more if you don’t do more with less,” said Stanley Klein, who runs Silver Meadows Farm, a small, multi-generational dairy farm in upstate New York. Dairy farmers have used sustainable practices to feed local communities for thousands of years. But then there was a huge shift. Farmers started producing for the world economy during World War II.
The transition from localized, sustainable dairy farming to a globalized approach meant farmers had to adapt to meet the demands of this new era. Silver Meadows was one farm that experienced these changes. To scale up while maintaining sustainable practices they developed efficiencies in water, land, animal nutrition, and waste management. The farm has cut down on its resource use, particularly in how it conserves water. “We recycle our water at least four times,” said Michelle Klein, Stan’s wife who co-runs the farm. In the 1940s, farmers needed to use the equivalent of roughly 11 glasses of water to produce a single glass of milk but thanks to innovative recycling techniques, modern farmers only need about three — saving the US around 150 billion gallons of water each year.
When dairy scaled up, it lost some traditional practices that are coming back because they are beneficial to sustainability. “Regenerative agriculture — it’s the new buzzword today, but it is something that has been done by farms for forever,” Stanley Klein said. Two tried and true methods gaining attention: Crop rotation, where farmers plant one crop and rotate to another after a few years, which improves long-term soil health, and cover cropping — laying a crop on top of another crop to maintain soil health and manage pests without synthetic chemicals. Silver Meadows uses both of these practices as they’ve scaled and it’s paid off. They’re helping safeguard vital resources for their herd, their farmers, and the people they feed.
As the dairy industry faces major challenges in an era of climate change, a critical question arises: Should dairy farmers turn to the traditions of the past or further embrace strategies of the present to reach the next level of sustainability?
Watch the video above to learn more about the dairy industry’s race to reach its climate goals.