The Environmental Impact of Dairy Production in the Eu

A typology was developed to provide a framework for examining the environmental impact of dairy farming and for setting priorities for environmental enhancement. This essentially differentiates systems according to the way in which farmland is managed combining economic/technical classification criteria (see section 2), bio-geographical region and forage and fodder resources (see section 3). Using these three dimensions, all dairy farm in the EU have been allocated to one of ten broad dairy systems by reference to threshold values of some key indicators such as fertiliser use, concentrate use, farm size, herd size, milk yield, livestock density and main winter fodder used (see section 4).