First Milk's Innovative Strategy Targets Water Quality and Sustainability

First Milk has launched a pioneering strategy aimed at improving water quality across its 700 member farms. This initiative addresses a persistent challenge within the dairy sector: the practical and consistent measurement and targeting of water quality risks at both farm and field levels.

Utilizing a data-driven approach, First Milk integrates two years of nutrient footprinting developed in collaboration with Farm Carbon Toolkit and satellite-based risk mapping from Senus. This combination helps identify areas where nutrient pressure and landscape risk overlap, allowing for prioritized interventions to benefit rivers and waterways while supporting resilient dairy farming.

The core of this strategy is nutrient footprinting, which tracks nitrogen and phosphate flow within farming systems. This process identifies efficient nutrient use and highlights imbalances that may contribute to environmental stress, offering farmers insights to enhance resource use and environmental performance.

Preliminary analysis indicates that farms with lower nutrient footprints can achieve milk production levels comparable to those with higher footprints, suggesting a balance between productive dairy farming and improved water stewardship. The analysis also identifies land use, fertiliser, and stocking density as major contributors to nitrogen pressure, while phosphate pressure is more linked to feed use and efficiency.

Senus water risk maps further aid farmers by evaluating fields based on factors such as slope and proximity to watercourses, helping identify areas at higher risk of nutrient runoff into rivers and streams.

First Milk's strategy builds on existing measures within its regenerative farming program, which includes practices like rotational grazing and improving soil structure. The initiative also aims to foster collaboration with local communities and partners at the catchment level to enhance water quality outcomes.

Ric Cooper from The Cleddau Project praised the initiative, noting the potential of farm-level nutrient footprinting to transform river restoration efforts. Lee Truelove, First Milk’s Head of Regenerative Farming, emphasized the importance of protecting water quality as central to regenerative farming and highlighted the initiative's role in strengthening environmental safeguards while maintaining a productive dairy sector.