Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
As California farmers work to curb methane emissions from the state’s sprawling dairy farms, they’ve found a convenient solution that helps control costs—and happens to offer benefits for the climate.
By feeding leftover nut shells from nearby almond orchards, dairy farmers not only support their neighboring farmers, they divert waste that would otherwise go into landfills where it generates methane. These leftovers also provide nutrition for the animals, replacing traditional forage like alfalfa that requires big swathes of farmland and copious amounts of water to grow.
“From a sustainability standpoint, it’s a game changer,” said Michael Boccadoro, a longtime livestock industry consultant and president of West Coast Advisors, a consulting firm and advisor to the dairy industry. “It means less land, less water, less energy, less fertilizer, less pesticides and less greenhouse gases.”
A 2020 study by University of California at Davis researchers demonstrates the benefits of feeding cows the material left over after an agricultural raw material is processed. Dairy farmers in California feed their cows other by-products, too, including spent grains from breweries, and vegetable scraps. Much of this would end up in landfills if not fed to cows, because it’s either too expensive to transport to other markets or has little value beyond cow feed, the researchers say.
The report found that if dairy farmers were unable to feed their cows these by-products, they’d need traditional forage, like alfalfa, instead. Producing that would require “1 million acres and 4 million acre-feet of water,” and would raise feed costs by 20 percent, the researchers found.
