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Dairy systems face mounting climate-related pressures that require integrated mitigation and adaptation across animal, manure, and land-based components. However, climate-smart adoption is often evaluated as binary uptake of individual practices, obscuring how producers assemble whole-farm portfolios and limiting insight into system-level emissions pathways. To assess how climate-smart transitions unfold in practice, we conducted a national survey of U.S. dairy producers (n = 920) encompassing current, previous, or non-adoption of 12 climate-smart practices and duration of use. We found that while adaptation strategies are deeply embedded within existing systems: 80–86% of producers currently use indoor housing or cooling fans, often for more than 25 years, mitigation adoption was uneven. Land-based strategies such as pasture or forage diversification were more common than capital-intensive manure and animal-based technologies.
We identified empirically distinct climate-smart practice portfolios, strongly shaped by system structure, feasibility, and capacity constraints, with institutional engagement reinforcing these patterns. Participation in production-oriented programs was associated with portfolios emphasizing indoor systems and manure technologies, while engagement in organic or grassfed certification predicted more diversified portfolios integrating land- and animal-based strategies. Climate beliefs and perceived practice effectiveness aligned with portfolio composition, further differentiating system pathways. These findings demonstrate that climate-smart adoption is governed by system-specific constraints and institutional pathways rather than a single transition trajectory. For environmental and agricultural policy, the results highlight the limits of one-size-fits-all program design and underscore the need for policy frameworks that account for structural diversity, feasibility constraints, and differentiated pathways to mitigation and adaptation within dairy systems. (in review, Environmental Science & Policy)
Proportion of U.S. dairy producers that have never (orange), previously (yellow), or currently (blue) used adaptation and mitigation practices, organized by practice type (n = 677-692).
Key Findings:
Adaptation strategies were widely embedded: 80–86% of producers used cooling fans or indoor housing for >25 years. Mitigation adoption remained limited, with 96% never installing anaerobic digesters and 80–83% never adopting other major manure technologies. Five system configurations emerged-- marginal (12%), conventional (35%), confinement (22%), hybrid (17%), and integrative (15%). Perceived efficacy strongly differentiated systems: believing grazing is effective increased the probability of hybrid and integrative membership by 7–9 pp (p ≤ 0.004). Institutional engagement reinforced system structure, with USDA production programs increasing conventional (+13 pp) and confinement (+12 pp) membership, and organic/grassfed certification predicting integrative membership (+9 pp, p < 0.001). Climate beliefs also distinguished systems: integrative producers were 10 pp more likely to attribute climate change to human causes (p = 0.011).
Average marginal effects (AMEs) on configuration membership with 95% confidence intervals. Points represent AMEs expressed as percentage-point changes in the predicted probability of belonging to each farm-system configuration for a 0–1 change in binary predictors and a 1-unit change in continuous or factor-score predictors, estimated from the multinomial logistic regression (Table 3). Horizontal bars denote 95% CIs. Triangles (▲) indicate effects statistically different from zero at p ≤ 0.05.
Radial plots illustrating the five dairy farm-system configurations (marginal, conventional, confinement, hybrid, and integrative) and their scores on four dimensions of the adoption spectrum framework: entirety (green), longevity (yellow), variability (purple), and sophistication (orange). Values represent segment-level means for each dimension
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