Green Dairy
Funding Agency : LOEWE / Duration: 2022 - 2025 // PI: Dr. Gerald Moser
The industrialization of agriculture offers several fundamental problems. Decoupled material cycles with high nitrogen surpluses, greenhouse gas emissions, soil degradation and problems regarding animal welfare result. The "GreenDairy" project aims to optimize agricultural structures and to enable ecologically and economically sustainable farming. By the use of integrated animal-plant agricultural ecosystems gaps of decoupled material cycles are expected to be closed. Additionally, effects of different farming systems (low-input vs. high-input) are to be investigated.
The project draws on the research infrastructure of the organically managed Gladbacherhof, where a digitalized dairy farming system has been established. The digital animal recording, grazing control, feeding and milking robotics, which is enabled by this system, helps to compare low-input systems (mainly roughage) with high-input systems (high proportion of corn silage and concentrated feed). In addition, the project incorporates research in animal, plant, soil, and environmental sciences, as well as agricultural and food economics, to provide a comprehensive picture of the impacts of different systems.
The Institute of Plant Ecology participates in the project area "Environment" with the investigation of greenhouse gas emissions in arable and grassland areas. At this, the climate-relevant gases CO2, CH4 and N2O are recorded using soil air probes and static chambers and are quantified subsequently. The measurements will be carried out over three years so that each crop in the project's crop rotation and the respective previous crops can be taken into account. Both cropland and grassland are analyzed, comparing high- and low-input areas. Thus, the aim is to minimize the emission of climate-relevant gases by an optimized agricultural system.