Farmers Who Want To Cut Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Grow Oats For Oat Milk But They Would Not Make As Much Money

Farmers who want to cut their greenhouse gas emissions could grow oats for Oat milk … but they would not make as much money. Oat milk has a much lower greenhouse gas footprint than cow milk for every litre produced and a new study commissioned by Boring Oat Milk and Agmardt, shows oat farming releases only 7% of the greenhouse gases that are emitted by dairy farming on a per-litre-of-milk basis and use 70% less land than dairy to produce a litre of milk. Boring Milk founder Morgan Maw says if dairy farmers converted 10% of their land into oat crops, they could reduce their emissions by 7%, but would make 12% less profit from the overall farm operation. The research shows dairy farming is still more lucrative than growing oats and Morgan Maw says those considerably higher returns from dairy mean farmers are less likely to move to arable farming. She says when one of the few justifications for dairy farmers to combine their land use with oats is to reduce greenhouse gas, but at the cost of profit, it makes it very challenging to convince farmers to change.