Dairy Sustainability

At an inaugural sustainable agriculture summit in Atlanta, California dairy farmer Steve Maddox talked about sustainable agriculture. "People want to know how their food is produced and how we go about it and what our lifestyles are like. Most people don't have a connection to the farm and they really want to hear the message. We need to be open, we need to be telling our story."

The term sustainability is used so often, I asked Chad Frahm, senior vice president of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy to describe sustainability in terms of the dairy industry. "In the narrowest sense, sustainability is being able to continue to provide nutritious dairy products into the future and optimizing that output with understanding and minimizing the influence and being respectful of the people and the planet in doing that. So in many cases, most sustainability definitions, whether it's in dairy or our customers and retailers that we work with, we talk about a three-legged stool. This is where the economic environment and social aspects of the products you are working on really need to be understood and appreciated so it's really about the economics, the environment and the societal impacts that we have been producing our food."