Global milk quality: evaluating tool for dairy farm

The concept of food quality is gradually expanding to include, in addition to intrinsic aspects of the quality, even the manner in which the food has been produced. Consumers are looking for nutrient, healthy and safe food, produced from environmentally sustainable and ethical processes. To evaluate the quality of both production processes and product, a multidisciplinary study was conducted in 29 Italian dairy farms. Farms were located in northern Italy and their total production was destined to produce Grana Padano PDO cheese. Average milk production, expressed as Fat and Protein Corrected Milk, was 27.0 kg/d per cow (CV=16.5%) and the farms had on average 78.6 lactating cows (CV=61.1%). Feed self-sufficiency was 65.9% (CV=25.7%); 82.3% of the concentrate feed and 15.9% of the forages was purchased. Each farm was visited to obtain milk samples for analyses, to gather information on farm management for the evaluation of profitability and environmental sustainability through Life Cycle Assessment method and to carry out animal welfare assessment. A pool of variables was used to define 6 aspects of global milk quality: animal welfare, environmental and economic sustainability, microbiological, nutraceutical and nutritional quality. For each quality variable, minimum and maximum benchmark values were identified to rescale indicator values into scores between 1 and 3. The 25% best performing farms for each quality variable received the score of 3, while the 25% worst performing farms were set to a score of 1; all other farms were scored 2. By matching the indices of the variables of the same quality aspect, a general index for each quality aspect was calculated. Figure 1 shows the scheme used to evaluate the scores of each quality aspect with the reference thresholds that identify the 25% best farms. No farm achieved the maximum score in the 6 aspects together; farms with high efficiency (>1.4 kg FPCM/kg dry matter intake) had the best scores for environmental, economic and microbiological index. This multidisciplinary evaluating system could find useful applications such as the development of support tools for managerial decisions, the provision to consumers of additional information on the quality of the production process, the development of a milk payment system based on a concept of global quality.