Certain silage inoculants improve efficiency, reduce waste, and cut emissions, helping farms meet sustainability goals. Lallemand’s new simulation tool takes this further – modelling all factors affecting farm output and proving, with data, the overall environmental footprint of milk or meat produced.
Treating grass and maize silage with an inoculant is a powerful yet simple way for farmers to reduce the environmental impact of forage production.
Silage additives improve fermentation in the clamp, preventing seepage of harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and effluent into watercourses, and also enhance preservation, which means that the acreage required to produce feed for a dairy or beef herd is maximized.
Then there is the ability of inoculants to enhance the feed value of the forage itself, reducing the requirement for supplementary concentrates to be added to rations.
All this in combination helps mitigate the negative environmental impact of forage production and, as a consequence, a dairy farming operation in general, suggests Luis Queiros, forage additives category manager at Lallemand Animal Nutrition, which produces the MAGNIVA range of silage inoculants.
“While every benefit may not directly impact carbon emissions, they may contribute to better use of land, reduce waste and improve feed efficiency. The technology a farmer uses in the production of milk and feed, can provide the tools needed to become a more profitable and sustainable farming business,’’ he says.
One commonly used method for assessing the environmental impact of a product, a process, or service is a life cycle assessment (LCA), which analyzes environmental impact across the entire life cycle.
A key strength of a LCA is that it studies the whole production process, thus enabling the agriculture industry to avoid mitigating one environmental impact at the expense of another.
LCAs have become crucial tools for helping farms to meet sustainability goals, driven by increasing demands from customers and regulators for higher environmental performance and transparency. They’re also driving product innovation at companies like Lallemand Animal Nutrition.
What sets Lallemand’s LCA apart from others operating in the same sphere is its recently developed simulation tool, which allows a range of parameters to be considered in generating a more accurate assessment — for example, the type of forage ensiled, its quality, and storage conditions.
General manager, Mathieu Castex, says it is a novel approach and specific to Lallemand.
“For farmers, the ability to simulate the impact of different variables on their environmental footprint is highly valuable. Our tool means they can clearly demonstrate how they can improve sustainability of the milk or meat they produce,’’ he says.
The LCA tool, which has been two years in development, even considers animal welfare and the wellbeing of humans in its computer modelling, by including factors such as benefits to human health from not handling potentially harmful pathogenic agents like molds and yeasts in untreated silage.
Land usage is another factor that’s included, says Mathieu. “Possibly one of the main challenges farmers will have in the next decade will be their ability to use less land to produce more food. If, through the use of an inoculant and good management of grass and corn in the field and in the bunker, they are able to produce higher forage yields and preserve that forage well, then that’s a positive for land management, productivity and overall sustainability.’’
The tool considers carbon emissions and other environmental impacts associated with producing grass or maize silage in conjunction with upstream (i.e. silage production per acre or hectare of land) and downstream (i.e. milk production) outputs, while taking into account how those effects can be mitigated through the use of an inoculant.
Scenarios calculate the impact of having more forage available to feed, since better preservation means reduced wastage which, as a consequence, means greater milk production from fewer external feed inputs.
Making the tool easy to use and farmer-friendly has been pivotal in the development of the LCA. With companies at various stages of developing their own LCAs, what sets Lallemand apart from others is the research it devotes to potential improvements at the forage feedout stage, notably through large scale in vivo trials under real conditions to fine tune its data base and calculation.
That research is concentrated at a dedicated facility in the US, where trials progress from in vitro studies to both small- and large-scale forage bunker combined with feeding trials.
“As a company, we approach these questions from a technical and scientific perspective and aim to provide guidance in innovation,” says Luis. “We approach sustainability issues in the same way.
“Demand for LCA information is currently greater in some countries — including the UK, Denmark and other Nordic regions – than in others,” he adds.
Mathieu concludes, “Farmers in those countries are already being asked by their buyers for this information, and with our LCA we are presenting them with new ways to answer these questions.’’
