JC Every food we eat has an impact on resource use, greenhouse gas emissions and air, water and soil quality.
These impacts may be positive or negative, but are not confined to meat and dairy products.
Most developed dairy industries worldwide have improved productivity and efficiency over the past century, reducing the quantity of resources used and greenhouse gas produced per kilogram of milk.
Indeed, the carbon footprint of British liquid milk is 1.17kg carbon dioxide/kg [PDF] – lower than the footprint of processed fruit and vegetables, grains or meat.
We need more research when comparing with other foods. However, a recent Swedish study showed we need to consider the nutritional value of the food produced – or how much nutritional “bang” we get for our carbon “buck”.
It is nearly always a question of scale, and the ability of human ingenuity to mitigate adverse consequences
Emily Norton, dairy-farming partner
Compared with alternative beverages such as soy juice, oat drink or beer, milk had a far higher ratio of nutrients provided per kilogram of carbon emissions, demonstrating we can’t simply rely on one metric (for example, carbon footprint) to identify environmentally friendly foods.
EN Dairy farming based on self-sufficient consumption and recycling of nutrients locally, particularly as part of a broader arable rotation using crops and resources that humans cannot directly consume, is actually environmentally beneficial.