In their work with sustainability, Arla Foods focusses on tracking the environmental impact of their main raw material, raw milk, – both at farm level, and at the national level. Arla is using this information as baselines and benchmarks for their environmental goals, as a tool for individual milk farmers, and for gaining knowledge about the environmental impacts and on how to mitigating impacts. The current report presents a comprehensive update (v2021 version) of the previous version of the FarmTool (v2016), which has been used to track and benchmark GHG emissions per kg milk at farm level.
The purpose of updating the FarmTool is to include a comprehensive range of best techniques for mitigating GHG emissions in the milk life cycle production system. The new modules of best techniques include various alternative techniques for:
Besides adding new modules enabling for modelling the effect of best techniques, the update also includes a significant increase in the granularity of data input types to be included in the calculations. This includes:
Further, the update includes a number of changes of the methodology. The most significant change is the way the beef by‐product (live animals) is estimated. Before, this was based on specification of the number of animals sent to slaughterhouse and their weights. Due to lack of data on this at the farm level as well as uncertainties caused by temporal variations, it has been decided to change the approach so that the by‐ product of live animals to slaughterhouse is now calculated based on generic data on weight gain.
