The Need for More Dairy Sustainability Partnerships

At Economist conference, USDEC President and CEO Krysta Harden explains the strides U.S. dairy has made and the help farmers and processors need to do more.

How can the promises of a green future be kept?

That was the broad question The Economist asked this week at its U.S. sustainability conference in Washington attended by more than 400 sustainability and business leaders, with another 6,000 registered participants online.

U.S. Dairy Export Council President and CEO Krysta Harden represented U.S. dairy in a panel discussion on Tuesday titled “Reaching Net Zero Through Public-Private Partnerships.” Harden shared the stage with moderator Vaibhav Sahgal of The Economist and the U.S. State Department’s Caroline D’Angelo, deputy chief sustainability officer, office of management strategy and solutions.

Harden shared the U.S. dairy industry’s ambitious 2050 Environmental Stewardship goals to achieve greenhouse gas (GHG) neutrality, optimize water use and improve water quality. She emphasized, “This cannot be done solely on the backs of farmers. They are willing. But they need partners.”

Harden was part of an impressive list of conference speakers, including CEOs, presidents, chief sustainability officers and environmental directors spanning industries and disciplines.

“The stakes are higher now,” said Harden on the need for more collaboration. “We have so much to gain, yet so much to lose if we don’t drive improvement and show results from public-private sustainability partnerships.”

In recent years, U.S. dairy has established several partnerships with the private sector, environmental NGOs and the government, such as: 

• The Greener Cattle Initiative.

• The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy created a partnership that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving the production and efficiency of dairy cow feed. 

• Nestlé has committed up to $10 million in a multi-year partnership to support U.S. Dairy’s Net Zero Initiative. The resources will help scale access to environmental practices and resources on farms of all sizes across the country.

• Starbucks is investing $10 million to provide more farmers access to effective and economically viable practices to reduce environmental impact – from feed production to manure management, cow care and on-farm energy efficiency.

When asked what the U.S. dairy industry needs most from the government, Harden said support that drives innovation, “groundbreaking resources done in a precompetitive way to help farmers and to help our entire industry have more solutions on things like genetics and feed rations.”

A vital component of a successful partnership is measuring results. “When someone is investing millions of dollars in our process, they want to see results,” said Harden. That, however, raises issues about how to collect and share data.

“Who owns the data is a big question when you are working with individual businesses,” said Harden. “How available is that data? Who is it available to? I'm not just talking about dairy manufacturing but 30,000 farms across the United States. Finding the right balance between what is important to share, what can be shared, and how it can be used is something our industry is still figuring out."

The panel's moderator asked Harden what the public sector could do in the near term to "supercharge" U.S. dairy's sustainability initiatives.