Can technology help achieve sustainable intensification? Evidence from milk recording on Irish dairy farms

Emma J. Dillon,Lorraine Balaine,John Lynch,Doris Läpple

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104437

Abstract

This article explores the potential of a farm technology to simultaneously improve farm efficiency and provide wider environmental and social benefits. Identifying these ‘win-win-win’ strategies and encouraging their widespread adoption is critical to achieve sustainable intensification. Using a nationally representative sample of 296 Irish dairy farms from 2015, propensity score matching is applied to measure the impact of milk recording on a broad set of farm sustainability indicators. The findings reveal that the technology enhances economic sustainability by increasing dairy gross margin and milk yield per cow. Furthermore, social sustainability is improved through a reduction in milk bulk tank somatic cell count (an indicator of animal health and welfare status). Conversely, milk recording (as it is currently implemented) does not impact farm environmental sustainability, represented by greenhouse gas emission efficiency. While the study shows that milk recording is a ‘win-win’ strategy, ways of improving current levels of utilisation are discussed so that milk recording achieves its ‘win-win-win’ potential in the future.

Highlights

Sustainable intensification is seen as an important means of addressing major challenges faced by the global food system, such as food security, environmental degradation and animal health and welfare concerns
The technology increases milk yield by 406 litres per cow on average at the 1% significance level. When expressing these results in terms of percentages of potential outcome means (i.e., POM1 in Table 3), we find that milk recording increases dairy gross margin and milk yield by 5% and 7% on average, respectively
The results suggest that our ATT estimates become sensitive to hidden bias if an unobserved characteristic causes the odds ratio of the adoption decision to differ between adopters and non-adopters by a factor of at least 2.35 for milk yield, 2.00 for bulk tank somatic cell count (BTSCC) and 1.55 for dairy gross margin

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable intensification is seen as an important means of addressing major challenges faced by the global food system, such as food security, environmental degradation and animal health and welfare concerns. The intention behind sustainable intensification is to increase food production while simultaneously enhancing all three sustainability pillars (i.e., economic, environmental and social). This is not an easy task as it relies on systemic change at all levels of the food supply chain (Firbank et al, 2018) and conflicts between economic, environmental and social sustainability may arise in the intensification process (Bos et al, 2013; Dawkins, 2017). Predicted growth in Irish agricultural output, mainly driven by increased dairy cow numbers and fertiliser use, is anticipated to result in a 9% rise in agricultural GHG emissions by 2030 relative to 2005 levels, thereby challenging the achievement of EU emission reduction targets (Lanigan et al, 2018). In the context of the EU Effort Sharing Decision, the country must decrease non-ETS emissions by 30% by 2030 relative to 2005 levels (Environmental Protection Agency, 2018)

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Conclusion