Synergies and trade-offs between environmental impacts and farm profitability: The case of pasture-based dairy production systems

Agriculture plays an essential role in pushing the Earth system toward, or even beyond, the boundaries of a safe operating space for humanity. Farms thus need to decrease the environmental footprint of their operations dramatically. In order to identify strategies that support farmers on this path, many studies use mass flow simulation or optimization models. However, they do not account for “real farm practices” and typically focus on a specific environmental category only, mainly on greenhouse gas emissions. By doing so, they ignore potential trade-off or synergetic relations between environmental impact categories. Furthermore, most of these studies ignore farm-level economic effects. From a farmer's perspective, however, it is crucial that mechanisms to decrease environmental impacts have a positive effect on farm profitability. Against this background, we conduct a comprehensive environmental impact assessment including the impact categories climate change (with and without carbon sequestration), terrestrial acidification, freshwater eutrophication, land occupation, water use, fossil depletion and biodiversity and additionally estimate farm profitability. Based on farm characteristics and management practices, we explore factors that jointly affect environmental impacts and profitability of dairy farms. To this end, a detailed high-quality dataset including site- and farm-specific variables of seven organic pasture-based dairy farms located in Southern Bavaria, Germany, for the year 2021 was used to conduct a cradle-to-farm gate attributional life cycle assessment. Our results suggest that the sample farms perform comparatively well in most environmental categories and that trade-offs between different categories and farm profitability exist. While we could not identify a one-fits-all solution, i.e. farm characteristics or management practices that minimize environmental impacts in all categories and maximize profit at the same time, we were able to determine some joint levers. A low level of or no concentrate feeding respectively as well as not farming wetlands, applying low fertilizer rates and pursuing low replacement rates with high lifetime daily yields were identified as win-win solutions for almost all categories. • A comprehensive environmental impact assessment including main environmental impact categories and farm profitability estimates is conducted. • A detailed high-quality dataset including site- and farm-specific variables of seven German organic pasture-based dairy farms is used. • Joint levers that can help dairy farmers to reduce environmental impacts without negatively influencing farm profitability are explored. • Potential trade-off and synergetic relations between environmental impact categories are shown.