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FARM-ES dairy stewardship program revises evaluation tool

The tool many dairy farmers use to measure their environmental impact has been updated.

Nicole Ayache with the National Milk Producers Federation says the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management Environmental Stewardship, or FARM-ES Program, uses an evaluation model that looks at the whole farm system. “It takes into account what the cows are consuming, rumination, excretion, how manure is stored and how it gets back to the crops, and then crop growth and how it gets back to the cows.”

It’s called the Ruminant Farm Systems or RuFaS model, and Ayache says it now reflects the latest science connecting the cropping with the cow management. “Before this, we did have the footprint from the cropping side, but it was sort of in this separate bucket, and now, it’s actually connected back, so when a farm goes through it and sees the results, it’s that whole-farm result all connected together.”

Ayache says before the updates, farmers couldn’t always see the whole-farm footprint needed for certain supply chain- incentivized projects. “There are customers and others who want to fund these field-level practices, these conservation efforts. Now that we have this all connected, it solves one of the problems that farmers were facing.”

Ayache says future updates to FARM-ES will include an economic module, so farmers can run scenarios showing both the environmental footprint and how changes can affect the bottom line.

AUDIO: Nicole Ayache discusses the updates to the FARM-ES tools with Brownfield’s Larry Lee