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  • PRO-DAIRY
  • Ruminant Center
  • Animal Science
  • Digital Agriculture
  • Environment

When you think about the science of dairy farming, you may think about cow genetics or feed formulation, but what about environmental stewardship? This includes things like manure management, cow comfort, and greenhouse gas reduction—all aspects of farming that continue to grow in importance.

For Cornell dairy researchers, environmental stewardship is synonymous with the Dairy Environmental Systems (DES) group, an agricultural engineering team with expertise in biosystems and mechanical engineering. DES is part of Cornell PRO-DAIRY, which supports the dairy industry in New York state.

While agricultural engineering was part of PRO-DAIRY since the mid 1990’s, DES was established in the early 2000’s, expanding from a focus on manure storage and cow comfort, to manure management, and water and air quality more broadly. Originally part of what is now called the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, DES ultimately became part of the Animal Science Department around 2018.

“Our group might seem like we don’t totally fit in animal science,” said Jason Oliver, senior extension associate and PRO-DAIRY dairy environmental systems engineer. “But were brought in because we work on production agriculture, which in New York state means dairy.”

DES continues to work on manure management but now also has an emphasis on climate issues, especially greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The emphasis on GHG stems from the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s commitments for greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050. Many players in the dairy value chain have made significant GHG reduction commitments too. Since milk production is a large part of the GHG footprint of dairy products, companies are very interested in helping to make changes at the farm level. 

The dairy farm GHG footprint is divided up into enteric (animal), manure, feed production, and energy emissions. Roughly speaking, enteric emissions represent one-third to one-half of the footprint; manure, if stored, contributes about one-third or more; and feed production is another quarter to one-third. Energy use at the dairy, on the other hand, represents less than one-tenth.  

The method New York uses to estimate statewide GHG emissions from all sources gives greater weight to methane than does the method used by the Environmental Protection Agency and other institutions. Since dairy cows and manure storage produce methane, New York sees dairy as contributing a big part of the state’s agriculture GHG share. 

“While agriculture represents about 6% of New York GHG emissions, around 80% of New York agriculture emissions are attributed to the dairy sector,” Oliver explained. “Roughly a third of that footprint is methane from dairy manure management. If we can reduce methane from cows and manure, New York dairy can be an important part of the solution.”

Most DES projects have been on commercial farms. But together with Lauren Ray, PRO-DAIRY agricultural sustainability and energy engineer, Oliver is leading the group to do more research at the Cornell University Ruminant Center (CURC), a 2,600 acre farm with over 600 dairy cows near Cornell’s Ithaca, New York, campus. There, DES team members concentrate on a spread of projects monitoring GHG and other harmful gasses.

At CURC’s manure storage pond, DES has set up open-path lasers as part of the New York State Connects Project. The lasers continuously monitor the methane off-gassing from the pond. “We’re starting to get real numbers behind the emissions of GHG from these manure storage systems,” said Oliver. “The next step is to connect those numbers to what’s happening at the farm that day, so can we make sense of these measurements”

“We’re starting to get real numbers behind the emissions of GHG from these manure storage systems. The next step is to connect those numbers to what’s happening at the farm that day.”

DES collaborates with other Animal Science Department research projects. The open-path laser measurements, for example, dovetail with work being done by the Cornell Agricultural Testbed and Demonstration Site (CAST) for the Farm of the Future, which is headed by Dr. Julio Giordano, animal science professor of dairy cattle biology and management. 

CAST seeks to develop an ecosystem of networked technologies and techniques to meet the needs of modern farms. The laser measurements will be combined with other farm data to help achieve CAST’s overall goal of combining data streams, Oliver said, so that dairy producers can make informed management decisions. 

In another project, the DES team and CAST researchers want to quantify barn emissions. To do that, they are placing anemometers, which measure wind speed and direction, along the ridge vents and outer walls of the barns at CURC. The anemometers will work in combination with internal barn sensors that measure concentrations of gasses such as methane and ammonia. 

“We’ll be measuring air flow in and out of the facility,” said Oliver. “Then we’ll know concentrations of a gas inside and outside, and we can integrate the data to get the actual rate of dispersal.”

The DES team also works with researchers connected to the Accelerating Livestock Innovations for Sustainability (ALIS) project headed by Joseph McFadden, associate professor of dairy cattle biology. McFadden and his team are studying feed additives that can lower enteric methane produced as a bi-product of cow digestion and expelled through cow burps. 

Tackling the question from the other end, the DES team is looking at the impact of these feed additives on manure emissions. “The question is, if we’re knocking down enteric methane emissions in the cow, does it shift those emission to the manure?” Oliver explains. 

Oliver and his team have created five-gallon bucket-scale chambers integrated with gas monitoring equipment to evaluate manure emissions from individual cows fed various methane-reducing test diets. In addition, they have set up manure mesocosms, 2,000-gallon experimental manure storages that allow them to monitor manure from larger numbers of animals all at once. Using the mesocosms, the DES team can also treat manure directly with various products designed to lower methane and other emissions, then monitor the results.

Soon, DES will be working on another project initiated by Michael Van Amburgh, professor of animal science, and Kirsten Workman, PRO-DAIRY nutrient management and environmental sustainability specialist. Van Amburgh created the Cornell Net Carbohydrate and Protein System (CNCPS), which predicts nutrient requirements and feed utilization for dairy cows. 

In this project, carried out on commercial dairy farms, Van Amburgh will be using the CNCPS model to formulate diets that may allow producers to reduce the total protein they feed their cows by optimizing feed ingredients while increasing milk production and quality. Since protein has a high amount of nitrogen, the goal is to decrease the amount of nitrogen the cows urinate out into the environment, Oliver explained. 

“We’ll have pens of animals on conventional diets and others on the improved diet,” he said. “We plan to evaluate the manure from separate pens using approaches we are developing and hope to demonstrate these improved diets also reduce fugitive nitrogen and ammonia emissions.”

Oliver points out that the research he and his team are involved in emphasizes the bio-circular nature of dairy production. “We need to think at a systems level,” he said. “Changes in diet, for example, impact cow emissions, which then impact the manure. That is going to affect how we treat the manure or how we handle it in the field. So we need to start connecting all the dots because it’s all one farm system.”

Jackie Swift is the communications specialist for the Cornell CALS Department of Animal Science.

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