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

Improving life time productivity

Overseas research shows that calves with high pre-weaning growth rates have improved milk yield compared with calves of lower pre-weaning growth rate. Though most of the literature arises from total or partial mixed ration systems overseas which can differ from our pastoral reared and seasonal supply system. In this research we have been collaborating with industry to compare the long term effects of increased pre weaning growth on life time productivity. See the publications for our findings in this research area.

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

Reducing waste

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. New Zealand's food system is estimated to produce over 1 million tonnes of waste, much of it requiring expensive waste disposal. In this research we will collaborate with stakeholders and end-users to explore opportunities for biowaste transformation within the dairy industry.