Building a sustainable future for dairy farming
Danone and its partner Royal FrieslandCampina are working to implement sustainable farming practices and to roll out concrete carbon reductions projects together with farmers in the Netherlands.
Last updated on March 24th, 2023
Why does it matter?
Danone is working with suppliers to create a positive impact across the whole value chain and to bolster collectively achieving our climate ambitions. The partnership between Danone and Royal FrieslandCampina is the result of a shared strong commitment: achieving net zero by 2050, as well as a commitment to improving soil health and biodiversity along the way. Supporting dairy farmers to produce milk in balance with nature is a key priority for both companies to reach a positive future.
How did we solve this?
This project has led to a strong engagement between Danone, FrieslandCampina and 600 dairy farmers. The collaboration uses a data-driven approach to reduce the environmental impact and carbon footprint of FrieslandCampina’s dairy farms through implementing regenerative agriculture practices. Depending on the nature of their farm, dairy farmers can take different measures to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some examples of the measures farmers adopted:
• Harvesting more protein from their own farmland, to increase their feed autonomy and reduce the impact of sourcing feed from far away
• Optimising the cows’ diet composition to increase feed digestibility to reduce enteric methane emissions and improve cows’ welfare
• Generating green electricity through use of solar panels to avoid fossil fuel use
This three-year (2017-2020) collaboration between FrieslandCampina and Danone led to over 17% reduction in GHG emissions and use of 100% of green electricity on FrieslandCampina dairy ingredients provided to Danone vs the 2015 baseline.
Opportunities for other farms?
This project not only demonstrates an opportunity for FrieslandCampina and Danone. Rather, it showcases the positive impact greater collaboration in the sector can yield for companies, their farmers, their animals, and the environment. The positive results from this partnership encouraged Danone and Friesland Campina to extend the collaboration for an additional 3 years. Together we will continue our efforts with the goal of reducing GHG emissions resulting from the production of milk sourced from FrieslandCampina by over 7%. This would result in almost a 25% GHG emission reduction over the course of the multi-year collaboration. In the coming years FrieslandCampina and Danone will continue to look at innovative solutions to scale up and speed up the transition to regenerative agriculture.
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