To meet the targets outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, many countries are actively working towards reaching climate neutrality and achieving net zero by 2050. With the livestock sector estimated to contribute approximately 11-17% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more research and innovation is required to understand the cause of these emissions and how they can be reduced.
Achieving net zero dairy farming provides a detailed insight into the fundamental processes within the dairy cow and those that occur on dairy farms that contribute to and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The book also considers the range of strategies which can be implemented to support the transition to net zero, including improving housing and housing management, supplementing diets with methane-inhibiting feed additives and optimising manure/slurry application.
Dr John Webster is Emeritus Professor in Animal Husbandry at the University of Bristol, UK. He established the Animal Welfare and Behaviour Group at the University of Bristol, one of the largest and most highly-regarded of its kind in the world, and was a founder member of the Farm Animal Welfare Council which pioneered the Five Freedoms for farm animals. Professor Webster is editor of an earlier Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing volume: Achieving sustainable production of milk Volume 3: Dairy herd management and welfare (published in 2017). Other key books written or edited by Professor Webster include Understanding the Dairy Cow and Animal Husbandry Regained: the place of farm animals in sustainable agriculture.
Dr C. Al Rotz is an Agricultural Engineer with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. Dr Rotz’s research activities are diverse, but all have involved experimental evaluation of machinery systems and the development, evaluation, and use of mathematical models of agricultural production systems.
Dr Luis O. Tedeschi is a Professor, Texas A&M AgriLife Research Fellow, and Chancellor EDGES Fellow at the Department of Animal Science, and an Honorary Professor at the Dipartimento di Scienze Agraria at the University of Sassari, Italy. He is recognized internationally for his accomplishments in the modeling nutrition of ruminants.
Since August 2019, John Newbold has been Professor of Dairy Nutrition at SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College, based at the Barony campus. He is keen to work collaboratively across dairy farming, the agricultural supply industries and academia, seeking to understand and improve the efficiency of conversion of natural capital (grasslands and food co-products) into nutritious, healthful and delicious food (i.e., milk and dairy products). Current projects include the evaluation of multispecies pastures, optimisation of amino acid nutrition to increase nitrogen use efficiency, and effects of dairy nutrition on methane emissions.
Dr Susanne Wiesner is an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark, in the Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering, in the group Waste, Climate and Modelling. Her research focuses on agricultural sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions and energy and water fluxes from natural and managed ecosystems.
