Hoard's Dairyman:
Gateway to opportunity
April 9, 2026
By Nicole Ayache, Chief Sustainability Officer
The National Dairy Farmers Assuring Responsible Management Environmental Stewardship (FARM ES) Program is designed for dairy farmers across the country to showcase U.S. dairy’s environmental leadership through a single streamlined platform. The program, which is developed with farmers through the program’s governance, saves farmers time and effort by alleviating repetitive requests from downstream buyers.
The program is dairy’s armor against the finger pointing that still gets aimed at animal ag — organizations that want to undermine dairy’s reputation as natural resource stewards. Dairy farmers are the original environmental stewards; our continued challenge is to demonstrate that fact to customers and consumers. Dairy’s nutrition story is well known — years of nutrition research shows consumers that dairy is a nutritional powerhouse, providing 13 essential nutrients in every serving. FARM ES, along with research efforts through Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) and others, help the industry tell a similar story for conservation efforts.
FARM ES provides the aggregated data for dairy cooperatives and processors to respond to supply chain requests while protecting individual farmer privacy. The FARM Program’s terms of service are clear: Farmers own their data. Cooperatives and processors that administer the program can aggregate farmer data, but no one can share individual farmer data without their permission, including the FARM Program.
According to a panel at the Dairy Sustainability Alliance fall meeting, more than 75% of cooperatives’ supply chain (or Scope 3) emissions were captured through aggregated FARM ES data. One platform helped streamline that sometimes onerous reporting effort. But the program isn’t just about protecting dairy’s license to operate.
Another feature of FARM ES is its role as a gateway to opportunities for dairy farmers. The program measures the impact of implementing beneficial practices and technologies — measurement that is critical to a variety of incentive projects. For example, the Dairy Feed in Focus program offers technical guidance and financial incentives for adoption of conservation best management practices. FARM ES is a measurement tool within the project to estimate greenhouse gas emissions of practice implementation.
Some organizations offer premiums for lower carbon footprint scores. In these situations, farmers are being rewarded for what they’re already doing: pursuing efficiency gains and productivity improvements. That gets directly reflected in FARM ES, a program that emphasizes that conservation needs to be a win-win for the business.
To motivate participation, some cooperatives and processors offer incentives. This can be a good on-ramp for farms to begin the process of setting a baseline. Prairie Farms Dairy, for example, offers a per-hundredweight (cwt.) incentive for the 12-month period when a farm participates in the program.
There are also new opportunities on the horizon. NMPF has worked with Athian and California Dairies Inc. on a pathway for farms to generate revenue using their FARM ES scores. The work will enable farms to generate carbon credits from their carbon footprint reductions measured through FARM ES.
Knowing where a farm’s environmental footprint stands today, thanks to FARM ES, is a critical first step to accessing additional financial and technical assistance opportunities.
This column originally appeared in Hoard’s Dairyman Intel on April 9, 2026.
