Biodiversity

Maintain or enhance biodiversity on dairy farms

The dairy sector utilises the largest quantity of land within the EU (over 50 million hectares). One of the main challenges to sustainable intensification is to balance productivity with maintenance and enhancement of biodiversity. Within participating countries and regions, there is a wide range of landscapes, production systems (including high nature value grassland) and localised environmental biodiversity drivers.

This provides an opportunity to analyse how biodiversity can be maintained and improved, through specific management interventions or by balancing the environmental goods and services required on a whole farm basis e.g. through ‘land sharing’ or ‘land sparing’. EuroDairy aims to identify current practices and new opportunities to maintain or enhance biodiversity on dairy farms. The objective is to establish and to demonstrate, how biodiversity can be maintained and enhanced within sustainable dairy farming systems.

Within the EuroDairy network, many activities are organised on this ‘accelerator of (ex)change’ in the dairy sector. Here an overview of everything you’ve missed so far!