Dairy: healthy food from a healthy environment

Dairy farmers are under pressure to realise efficiency and productivity gains as well as to improve their environmental performance. Some measures to improve environmental performance will be cost effective, others will increase production costs. Every dairy farm has a unique combination of management, land resources and environmental issues and so each has a unique set of solutions. Best management practices based on research projects around the nation are being developed for dairy farmers to address their salient issues. However, improvements in environmental performance (particularly at the catchment scale) maybe difficult to measure and difficult to relate to changes in farm management. Ultimately, there will be an environmental cost associated with productive farm land when compared to undisturbed catchments.