Greenhouse gas footprint tools on farms
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The need is growing for U.S. dairy farms to calculate and reduce their carbon footprint to meet the Net Zero Initiatives set by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, in addition to other global, regional, and state climate change targets, requirements set by individual retailers, and satisfaction, or approval, of consumers. The Cool Farm Tool is a freely available, globally recognized whole-farm evaluation tool that can calculate the emissions of a dairy farm, identify emission hot spots, run scenarios to determine the best mitigation opportunities, and track progress over time. These opportunities often have additional benefits for the farm, including increased productivity, greater resilience to the effects of climate change, and improved bottom lines. We will test this and several other greenhouse gas footprint tools on N.Y. dairies over the next two years and will report what we learn in future articles.