This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every product or service has a "carbon footprint," a measure of the environmental impact of creating or delivering it. A new study from the lab of Elias Uddin, assistant professor of animal science in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR), determined a more accurate measure of the carbon footprint of milk produced in Bangladesh.
This work was recently published in the Journal of Dairy Science. The key data used in this study were collected from the Bangladesh Agricultural University Dairy Farm during 2018–2023. Uddin's lab collaborated with researchers from Bangladesh Agricultural University on the study.
They calculated emissions related to the cows' diet, including fertilizer used to grow feed, enteric emissions produced by the cows' digestive processes and manure management. Enteric fermentation (digestion) accounted for 48% of emissions, followed by feed (24%), manure (20%) and energy used to run the farm (8%). According to standard life cycle assessment (LCA) guidelines, the data included not only emissions related to lactating cows but also nonlactating members of the herd.
"You have to account for those nonlactating animals, because those are part of the production system," Uddin says. "You cannot just avoid them because they don't produce milk." This study did not include the emissions associated with the milk once it left the farm because researchers did not have access to data about how far the milk traveled and how it may have been processed after delivery. On average, during the five-year period, the carbon footprint of milk on the farm was 5.18 kilograms per kilogram of milk.
This is a measure of how many kilograms of carbon are required to produce one kilogram of milk. Previous work has held that dairy production in Southeast Asia has a much higher carbon footprint than U.S. or European dairy farms. The carbon footprint of those farms is about 1 kg of carbon emissions per kilogram of milk.
This calculation is based on the fact that American and European cattle are much more productive; each cow produces an average of 30–40 liters of milk a day (8–11 gallons), compared with cattle in developing countries like Bangladesh, which produce only four to eight liters of milk daily (1–2 gallons). However, this study demonstrated that using farm-specific data and the Tier 2 equations proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in a 27% lower carbon footprint of milk compared with previous estimates based on the more generalized Tier 1 equations. Critically, the cows' productivity increased by 63% over the five-year study period.
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