Projects

One of the key objectives of the Dairy Futures:Living Lab is to provide a platform for research and industry engagement to work together to solve the challenges facing agriculture. As a university farm we aim to encourage, engage and enable under graduate and post graduate students in various aspects of research.

Some of the research will be short term component studies within the wider Dairy Futures:Living Lab farmlets while other projects will run in parallel to the farmlet. The Living Lab initiative will support research in under graduate courses (for example PLSC321 and ANSC 312), Honours projects, Masters and PhD's.

An important part of our research is collaboration. The Dairy Futures Living Laboratory is partnering with the Low N Systems here in New Zealand, with the aim to find adoptable solutions for reducing N loss. We've also teamed up with the European Transform Dairy Net project to support farmers and stakeholders in their cow calf contact journey. We're open to national and international collaboration to support the incubation of ideas which enahnce the dairy sector.

Themes

Environment

New Zealanders care deeply about the environment and the goal for this Living Lab project is to identify opportunities and develop solutions for reducing the impact of dairying on water quality and green house gas emissions. Recently (since 2023) we have been teaming up with DairyNZ and the Low N Systems program which is a collaborative project to investigate the impact of stacking N loss mitigation's on nitrate leaching risk. The Low N systems is utilising the Dairy Futures Living Lab prototype farmlets to implement and test the outcomes of modelling (see our publications) with the goal to acheive N loss reductions of 40 to 60 percent or more, while maintaining farm business viability.

Animal welfare

New Zealand's dairy industry exports most of its products, so meeting expectations of both our local and global consumers is integral in our food production activities. Delivering the highest animal welfare standards is not only the right thing to do but has implications on market accessibility. One welfare concern is the conventional practise of separating cows and calves at birth, and this practise may become a challenge for the industry in the future. The Dairy Futures Living lab has been collaborating with industry, farmers, and students to learn more about the challenges and opportunities with cow calf contact (CCC) in pastoral systems. We are also collaborating with the European Union project 'Transform Dairy Net' to explore ways to inform and support CCC systems. See our research in publications

Efficiency

Efficiency in farming is needed to ensure we are making optimal use of available resources. Our Living Lab projects to improve efficiency currently fall into two categories with the first one being calves. To improve efficiency and reduce waste we are investigating the effect of early life feeding of replacement heifers to assess the long term impacts on productivity, at the same time we are exploring opportunities to make the most of non-replacement calves. Our second efficiency project addresses questions around circular economies. Reducing waste in food production is an important part of sustainability. This research is a collaboration between universities (University of Canterbury) and the Bioeconomy Science institute (Manaaki Whenua) to investigate opportunities to reduce food waste and increase energy availability in livestock production systems.