The Your Farm – Your Footprint initiative is a unique program that meets the growing need of producers to know and understand their farms' carbon impacts and take charge of conversations about dairy sustainability.

To dairy farmers, carbon credits, or offsets, are best known in association with anaerobic digestion. These projects require big farms with significant amounts of manure and plenty of capital, resulting in credits sold to buyers outside of the dairy or even the food and beverage industries.

As a dairy farmer, you are no stranger to innovation and efficiency on the farm. So when approached by developers interested in building an anaerobic digester on your property, it is essential to consider the big picture. Here's what you need to know as you navigate this opportunity.

Explore three trends in manure management and their potential to impact operational efficiency.

The benefits of sand bedding for dairy cows are many. However, sand is not always the easiest material to incorporate into manure management systems.

Controlling pathogen outgrowth in recycled manure bedding is possible. When a bacillus-based bedding additive was tested on-farm, a significant reduction in bulk tank SCC and mastitis cases was noticed.

As manure applicators, we should know how many gallons or tons we are applying to an acre and should have corresponding documentation. The question is: “How do we determine the rate?”