It’s fair to say the USA has dominated news lately with geopolitical changes. It was against this backdrop that I recently travelled to San Francisco to meet up with farmers and customers.
Going into the trip, I was keen to find out what federal decisions around climate change mitigations would mean for dairy farmers. What I discovered is that, like New Zealand farmers, Californian farmers are committed to improving efficiency on-farm and improving productivity.
We have to remember, America is huge. Not one state represents the country in general – there are 50 different states and all have different dairy production systems and rules and regulations. There’s what happens at a federal level, then the state level, and then county. Consumer demand for milk products is steady1, with milk considered an essential food item. With the cost of living crisis impacting Americans, many farmers are noticing consumers are now more focused on how much food items cost than how their milk is produced and agriculture’s climate change impact. But there are still market pressures affecting farmers in every state; and incentives to make changes.
Despite federal decisions, California is still committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. It has an ambitious target of 40% methane reduction by 2030, which on the face of it is higher than our goal. The way it pursues these goals as a state is very different to us in New Zealand.
For context, there are around 1,200 dairy farms in California and 1.69 million lactating cows. California is the top producer of milk in all of the USA, producing around 40 billion pounds2 of milk a year (20% of US milk production3).
California dairy farms are largely cut and carry systems where grass is cut and fed to the cows in a feed lot or barn, along with other feed such as alfalfa and soy. Effluent (and methane) is concentrated and contained within the barn system. The state has invested heavily into funding dairy biodigesters and alternative manure management programmes; things like solid separation and compost, bedded barns and weeping walls as mitigation strategies. Biodigesters (anaerobic digesters) are significant pieces of infrastructure and can cost upward of $1.2 million. I saw clusters of farms working together to save on capital costs. One anaerobic digester might be serving 12 farms.
There’s now a real crossover between the agriculture and energy sectors in California with farms producing ‘green’ electricity from methane captured on farm. It has displaced the reliance on fossil fuels on-farm and some farms are looking at the electrification of harvesting and transferring feed. One farmer I spoke to said that he would get a return of around $4,000 per cow for milk and an additional $1,400 per cow for energy produced. He’s become an energy farmer as well as a dairy farmer but hasn’t had to fundamentally change the way he farms.
California is also looking into ways to improve soil fertility, biodiversity, and lower emission feed and offers incentives to farmers to apply new approaches.
There is no shortage of companies in the USA and globally offering solutions to reduce emissions on-farm, but we need to adopt practices that fit our system. I saw great things happening in the dairy sector in California but many of its mitigation approaches are not relevant to us. Its methane capture programmes won’t work in a pastoral setting and we’ve been practising soil health approaches for years whereas many California farms are just waking up to its importance.
Where we’re aligned is the need to improve the efficiency and productivity of each cow. The name of the game (and we’re all in it together globally) is to try and produce food more efficiently in the future than today; by being more carbon-efficient to get more milk from less resource.
New Zealand’s competitive advantage is that we can produce milk in a highly sustainable way with great animal welfare standards, and our cost of production is lower than the rest of the world. Our focus is to maintain this advantage for our farmers.
1. US Department of Agriculture. Daily Market News. Volume 92, Report 11. March 2025. www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/dywweeklyreport.pdf
2. Top U.S. states based on milk production 2020 to 2023. Published by M. Shahbandeh, 21 June 2024. Statista.com
3. https://www.cience.com/companies-database/united-states/dairy/california