Researchers with the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago say a new study shows a warming climate will reduce global dairy production by up to 10 percent.

Lead author Claire Palandri says even one day of extreme heat impacts a cow’s milk production significantly. “When you look at 10 days, we find that you still have effects.”  She says, “Of course, as the heat wave persists, you again have those effects that’s just accumulating.”

Co-author Eyal Frank notes that economically viable cooling strategies only negate about half of those production losses.

“At the very extreme levels of heat stress, they’re less effective.”  He says, “They’re maybe reducing it by 40 – 30%. So yes, there’s some scope for adaptation, but it is far from a magic bullet that’s just going to make these climate change impacts go away.”

Palandri says even reasonable scenarios indicate U.S. milk production would decline by one percent by mid-century, with greater losses in less-developed countries.

“For India and Brazil, without cooling, we have decreases of about 4% of milk production per cow per day because of the number of extreme days that are projected in the future.”  She says, “Using current cooling that reduces them to like 2.5% in these two countries, for example.”

Both say the research demonstrates the value, as well as the limitations, of cooling technologies that dairy farmers can implement to reduce production-impacting stressors in cattle.

The study was recently published in the journal, Science Advances – see the entire published paper here.

Source: Brownfield Ag News / Jared White