For the dairy industry, there are lot of climate-smart opportunities. Navigating the decision-making process with lenders, as well as the financial implications at the farm level to ensure these climate-smart practices are cost-effective, are significant when deciding which opportunities make sense for dairy operations.

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.

Going forward, a dairy’s value will not only be determined by the quality of their milk, but by the scale of their climate impact.

There are several sustainability programs available for producers to adapt on their farms to receive carbon credits or some other incentive payment in return.