Dairy Farmers of America – Andrew Rubenbauer – 2023

Goals

The agricultural sector is responsible for growing more food for an increasing global population on a warming planet while aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Dairy can be a solution through swift, comprehensive action to reduce enteric methane emissions.

DFA enlisted EDF Climate Corps fellow Andrew Rubenbauer to assist on numerous projects that move DFA toward its science-based emissions target, improve or maintain farmer economic conditions, and keep the public’s well-being in mind.

Solutions

Embracing the “One DFA” mentality, Rubenbauer engaged stakeholders across the cooperative to address these challenges together, efficiently and effectively. A few examples include:

• Conducted a SWOT analysis of partners to help implement on-farm sustainability practices while decreasing farmers’ economic burden. This informed a generalizable process for evaluating partners, centralizing information, and communicating with stakeholders.
• Cross-divisionally developed public-facing materials and a launch plan for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant, which influenced the team’s onboarding to a new project management software.
• Interviewed staff to understand barriers to incorporating sustainability into their work and projects, proposing an internal education program, a communications process to share trends and updates, and cross-divisional sustainability representation.

Potential Impact

By working through cross-divisional processes that promote and cultivate collaboration, information-sharing, and trust-building, DFA can create capacity for more comprehensive and impactful customer projects. These projects can increase DFA and farmer revenue while reducing customer emissions throughout the supply chain.

DFA can continue to produce a nutritious commodity but with practices that improve agricultural efficiency and decrease milk’s carbon footprint.