Open Country opens butter plant
When American retail giant Cosco came to audit Open Country Dairy’s new butter plant at the Waharoa site and give the green light to supply their American stores, they allowed themselves a week for the exercise.
It shows that between 2022 and 2023, total emissions from agriculture decreased 2.2% which included a 1.6% drop in dairy cattle emissions due to a fall in dairy cow numbers.
This is part of a trend that has seen methane emissions from dairy cattle decrease by 4.11% since 2017.
DairyNZ statistics show a 3.4% decrease in cow numbers - from 4.84 million in the 2021/22 season to 4.67 million in the 2022/23 season.
Average milk production per cow however increased over this same period by 1.8%, up to 393kgMS from 386kgMS.
