Environmental outlook to 2030 in cow's milk production systems in Mexico

Abstract

The objective of this study was to evaluate the environmental performance of cow milk production in small and medium scale systems in Mexico, through life cycle analysis with a cradle to farm gate approach, for the period 2021-2030. The established functional unit was 1 kg of milk corrected for fat and protein. The impact assessment was carried out with the OpenLCA 1.11.0 software, using the ReCiPe method, considering seven impact categories: agricultural land occupation (ALO), marine ecotoxicity (ME), human toxicity (HT), climate change (CC), fossil depletion (FD), soil acidification (SA), and water depletion (WD). Among the main results of the research, the production of cattle feed was identified as the chief contributor to environmental loads in most of the categories with percentages above 71 %, while on-farm emissions contribute to the environmental loads for the CC (28 %), FD (26 %) and SA (59 %) categories. A comparison was made between pessimistic, base and optimistic scenarios for the years 2021 and 2030, which confirmed an improvement in environmental efficiency in the optimistic scenario, the increase in production volume represents a decrease of 6 % and 5 %, respectively, in the assessed impact categories.