UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
J Environ Manage. 2016 May 1;172:143-50. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.02.030. Epub 2016 Mar 1.
Dairy production leads to significant environmental impacts and increased production will only be feasible if the environmental performance at farm level permits a sustainable milk supply. Lameness is believed to become more prevalent and severe as herd sizes increase, and can significantly reduce milk output per cow while not influencing other attributes of the production system. The objective of this work was to quantify the effect of lameness on the environmental performance of a typical grazed grass dairy farm and evaluate the theoretical value of sensor-based real-time lameness management. Life cycle assessment was used to compare a typical baseline farm with scenarios assuming increased lameness severity and prevalence. It was found that lameness could increase the farm level global warming potential, acidification potential, eutrophication potential and fossil fuel depletion by 7-9%. As increased herd sizes will increase cow: handler ratio, this result was interpreted to suggest that the use of sensors and information and communication technology for lameness detection could improve management on dairy farms to reduce the adverse impact on environmental performance that is associated with lameness.
奶制品生产会对环境造成重大影响，只有在农场层面的环境绩效允许可持续牛奶供应的情况下，增加产量才可行。随着畜群规模的扩大，跛行被认为会变得更加普遍和严重，并且会显著降低每头牛的牛奶产量，而不会影响生产系统的其他属性。这项工作的目的是量化跛行对典型放牧草饲奶牛场环境性能的影响，并评估基于传感器的实时跛行管理的理论价值。生命周期评估用于比较典型的基准农场和假设跛行严重程度和流行率增加的情景。结果发现，跛行可能会使农场层面的全球变暖潜能、酸化潜能、富营养化潜能和化石燃料消耗增加 7-9%。由于畜群规模的增加会增加奶牛与饲养员的比例，因此这一结果表明，使用传感器和信息通信技术进行跛行检测可以改善奶牛场的管理，从而减少与跛行相关的对环境性能的不利影响。
