Taking Steps Today. For Tomorrow.

FarmAhead™ Technology

Dairy is a nutrient-dense food, but it also comes with a carbon footprint that we’re working on reducing. We want to produce quality dairy products with care in every step. At our farms. For our animals. And the land we depend on. To do that, we’ve developed a toolbox of data-driven and science-based technologies for our farmer owners to measure, understand and move ahead in their individual sustainability transition on farm. We call this FarmAhead™ Technology. Using the toolbox, Arla farmers will be rewarded for the steps they have taken and will be able to identify the most effective next steps. The more action they take, the more they are paid for their milk.

FarmAhead™ Check

How we measure the carbon footprint on farm

Helping our farmer owners spot ways to lower their farms' emissions requires knowledge. So, we've developed a FarmAhead™ Check to collect data and build our knowledge. Farmers use it to collect more than 200 data points; from what the cows eat to the energy that is used on the farms. The results are verified by a third-party advisor and stored in a large dataset that gives us great and precise insights into dairy farming across seven countries in Northern Europe and multiple opportunities to support and motivate our farmers to move ahead faster in their sustainability transition. We also share learnings with industry stakeholders, politicians, and research partners for continuous development.

Here's how it works

How we measure the carbon footprint on farm

FarmAhead™ Incentive

Rewarding farmers for sustainability activities

Imagine if you were rewarded for your efforts to reduce your climate footprint. Arla farmers are. To encourage farmers to reduce the carbon footprint of their milk and improve protection of biodiversity on the farm, they get points for feeding their cows efficiently, managing manure well or using renewable electricity, to mention a few. The more points a farmer earns, the more they are paid per kilo of milk. We have earmarked up to 500 million Euro annually to reward our farmer owners' sustainability activities.

How we reward farmers

FarmAhead™ Partnership

How our customers contribute to the journey

Our key customers in retail, foodservice and in the food industry share our desire to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from dairy production and improve protection of nature and biodiversity.

We all depend on the primary producers, the farmers, to accelerate the positive change on farm. Through FarmAhead™ Customer Partnership, our customers can invest in on-farm sustainability efforts and directly contribute to reducing Arla’s emissions, which also helps them reduce the emissions from their own value chain. Together, we can encourage and support Arla farmers and their use of our FarmAhead™ Technology toolbox to deliver further improvements for climate and nature.

How our customers contribute to the journey

Some of our FarmAhead™ Innovation projects

To make sure that FarmAhead™ Technology continuously evolves with the latest science-based knowledge and technological innovations within agriculture, we're running a number of projects to explore other ways of further reducing emissions and improve biodiversity. You can see some of them below.

Regenerative farming pilot

In a 4-year pilot farm programme, 24 Arla farmers are exploring regenerative farming methods in a structured and coordinated manner together with regenerative agriculture experts from FAI Farms. The pilot farmers live in the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark and are a mix of conventional and organic farmers.

Testing a methane reducing feed additive

Together with Royal DSM, we're running a pilot to test the methane reducing feed additive Bovaer® on 10,000 dairy cows across European farms. Research indicates that Bovaer® can reduce methane emissions by around 30 per cent.

Arla's Climate Ambition

Our climate ambition is to become carbon net zero by 2050. On the road to net zero emissions, we are committed to reducing CO2e emissions significantly by 2030:

63% reduction in production, owned logistics and energy usage (consistent with reductions required to keep global warming to 1.5°C)*
30% reduction on farms and of emissions from sourced whey, 3rd party logistics and packaging

*Approved by Science Based Targets initiative

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