What should I do if I have a herd that is used for meat and milk production?
You have 2 options:
1. Preferably, beef and dairy assessments should be assessed
separately using each pathway, but only if you have sufficient
data to segregate all the inputs between the two systems.
2. If you cannot separate the two systems easily, you can enter all the beef animals into the sold animals section of your dairy assessment. We follow the IDF recommendation of using biophysical allocation, which means splitting the emissions between milk as a product from on-farm dairy cows, and the “liveweight” from the animals that are sold. We split all emissions between the dairy animals and sold animals except for fuel/energy, refrigerants, and transport emissions which remain fully allocated to milk. Within your dairy assessment, the emissions you see allocated to sold animals will show as a co-product in your results, but this may not give you a full picture of your production emissions for those sold animals, as they are missing fuel/energy, refrigerants, and transport.