Well–targeted incentives that encourage climate-friendly investments among dairy producers of all sizes would greatly aid the entire dairy industry in its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, potentially making earlier achievement possible, Indiana dairy farmer Mike McCloskey said in a hearing of the House Committee on Agriculture’s Subcommittee on Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit.
“We have committed in the dairy industry that we are going to go to net zero,” said McCloskey, chairman of the National Milk Producers Federation’s Environmental Issues Committee. “We can get there with your support.”
The dairy industry has adopted an ambitious goal of becoming a carbon-neutral sector of the economy by 2050 through its
Net-Zero Initiative, a partnership among farmers and the entire production chain. But with policies that encourage dairy farmers to widely adopt emissions-reduction technologies such as anaerobic digesters, spur private investment and alleviate market uncertainty, the goal could likely be reached even sooner, McCloskey said.