Problems and opportunities

Asturias and Galicia together account for 49% of the livestock census and 68% of dairy farms in all of Spain, representing 4.5% of agricultural production. The agri-food system linked to milk must be based on the use of sustainable practices, focusing on the quantification of ecosystem services and climate neutrality, with the goal of providing consumers with product selection criteria through brands created for this purpose.

The use of sustainable practices leads to the much-desired climate neutrality based on the potential for carbon sequestration, the high biodiversity associated with permanent pastures, which are the foundation of the ecosystem services they provide at both the farm and landscape levels, and the use of technologies that minimize the carbon footprint. The different types of farms in Asturias and Galicia that produce milk, with or without associated land that may or may not be grazed depending on socioeconomic limitations, mean that the implementation of sustainable practices in these areas must be approached in a differentiated manner, tailored to the idiosyncrasies of each farm typology.

Within the CLIMALACT project, a preliminary study has been conducted, indicating that there are four distinct types of farms that can be categorized as follows: intensive (stabled animals with completely external forage purchase), semi-intensive (stabled animals with forage cultivation on the farm), semi-extensive (grazing animals for most of the year with forage purchased from outside the farm), and extensive (grazing animals for most of the year with forage cultivation on the farm). The transition from one typology to another often depends on land distribution and ownership, which is not easy to modify. However, this does not mean that mechanisms for improving sustainability and achieving climate neutrality cannot be established for each farm type, through the creation of benchmarks or typologies for each farm and its associated value chain.

The CLIMALACT project aims to identify and standardize farm/landscape/value chain management practices associated with the “CLIMALACT” brand, and provide, through co-creative processes (multi-actor methodologies), typologies of dairy agri-food systems in Asturias and Galicia based on the calculation of simple sustainability and climate neutrality indicators, in order to achieve transparency in farm and value chain management and continuous improvement of sustainability. It is necessary to provide farmers with management tools that allow them to achieve sustainability and climate neutrality, ensuring a sustainable market that guarantees their future adoption by farmers, by establishing a marketing strategy linked to “CLIMALACT.”