Carbon footprints result from livestock production in Poland based on NPC tools from CCCFarming project - limitations and perspectives

Abstract

The use of accounting tools for estimating greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia (NH3) emissions from dairy farms is of increasing importance for monitoring environmental performance and identifying effective mitigation strategies. In the EU project, Climate Care Cattle Farming Systems (‘CCCfarming’) three GHG accounting tools were used: ANCA, Agrecalc, CAP’2ER. In Poland – one of the project participants – eight selected farms representing a country-wide variety of housing systems, management practices, breeds, feeding, and land were used. One large farm with 1437 cows and the smaller one’s with 10 to 100 cows were monitored. Average milk production per cow was 9241 kg (from 5600 in small 10 cows-farm and in ecological to 15 000 in intensive production farms) in all analyzed farms. Compared with the other farms from the other CCCfarming project countries, based on NPC tools, GHG emission intensity in Poland was one of the highest (1620 g CO2eq/kg FPCM). The average GHG emission intensity in Polish farms was 1.44 kg CO2eq/kg FPCM whereas in the other project countries from 0.94 to 1.08 kg CO2eq/kg FPCM. However, it should be emphasized that the implemented NPC tools were adapted to Polish conditions and were not always easy to use, therefore, the results obtained for other countries such as Latvia, or Lithuania may systematically differ. We can however conclude that the emission reduction strategies proposed in the project, e.g. covering slurry tanks or nutritional strategies, can significantly reduce emissions from Polish dairy farms.