Milk perspectives

How sustainable is the milk produced on the farms? This question is increasingly posed by consumers, retail and even the industry in recent years. For the first time, dairies and their farmers have a reliable answer from the QM Dairy Sustainability Tool. Project facts and details.

FFor a long time now, major and internationally operative dairy groups have been creating their own programs for sustainable milk production. However, there hasn’t yet been an industry-wide, comprehensive and practical solution for all dairies in Germany. Although the QM Milk system reliably ensured high quality and safety standards in milk production, it only partially addressed classic sustainability issues.

This gap is filled by the QM Dairy Sustainability Tool. For the dairy industry, the tool is an important measure of competitiveness, resource efficiency, and transparency: Processors, retail, consumers and NGOs such as animal welfare associations are increasingly interested, nationally and internationally, in the conditions animals are kept in on the farms and how natural resources such as soil or biodiversity are managed.   

Criteria with evaluation approaches

The sustainability tool addresses many different questions directed at dairy farmers, which relate to the fields of the environment, economy, animal welfare and society. For example: What is the ratio between the number of cows and the available resting/feeding areas? How happy are you with the economic situation in the past three years? What is the percentage of extensively cultivated grassland based on permanent grassland? And how much has the farm invested in the modernisation of milk production in the past five years? The criteria catalogue coveres around 84 criteria; most of these required ticking and data input, but there are also some free text fields.

Dairy farmers answere the questions on their own, often based on existing documentation. The questionnaire can be completed on paper or online. A web-based database provides support for the systematic data collection and evaluation. The tool is fundamentally designed as a form of voluntary self-disclosure. Above all, the tool aims to create transparency and set in progress an ongoing learning and development process across the sector. High importance is attached to data protection and anonymity of the individual businesses to third parties, and the data collected is used in accordance with strict contractual regulations.

Data comparable across the industry

A core component of the tool is a system that evaluates the farmers’ responses. The statements are assessed using a four-point scale: particularly good, good, satisfactory and unfavourable. This performance classification is intended to show the respective farmers and agricultural holdings how they compare with other farms with regard to their strengths and weaknesses and encourage them to further develop. For this purpose, the participants receive individual farm reports of the results, referred to as benchmarks. These compare the results of the individual farm with those of all the surveyed milk producers.

This provides dairies, for the first time, with systematic sustainability data from their milk suppliers, which in turn, enables them to advise their customers and the public, in anonymised form, about sustainability aspects of milk production. Dairies and milk producers can also jointly analyse the identified strengths and weaknesses, thereby developing approaches for improvement.

Positive conclusion of the pilot phase

During the pilot phase of the sustainability module from June 2017 to June 2020, this sustainability survey was completed by almost 7500 milk producers for their dairies across Germany. This equates to about 12 percent of all milk-producing companies in Germany. Out of the member cooperatives of the Uelzena Group, 443 milk producers have already answered the questionnaire, which is just over half of all producers.

QM Dairy Sustainability Tool – the project continues

July 2020 was the starting date for the next project phase, which was self-funded by the participating dairies. The majority of the dairies from the pilot phase and a few additional dairies will be using the improved dairy sustainability tool. The questionnaire was also updated. For instance, additional question and answer categories were included and some questions deleted, in part due to customer requests. Several of the criteria evaluations were adjusted based on the latest scientific findings and the results of workshops with multiple stakeholders. Workshops at the end of 2019 involved representatives from various sections of the milk value chain as well as scientists, consultants and representatives from NGOs, agricultural associations and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture.