Climate-smart dairy practices and perceptions across 2 global dairy producing countries

Both in the United States and internationally, the dairy sector has set ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and implement climate-smart agriculture practices. Despite this, little research has explored dairy producer perceptions or adoption of climate-smart practices, especially across contexts. This study presents the first comparison study of dairy producer adoption and perceptions around climate-smart practices across 2 major dairy-producing countries, New Zealand and the United States. Data were collected through 2 online surveys (deployed in 2023 US and 2025 in New Zealand), which were developed to reflect contextual differences for each respective country and included current and anticipated adoption of climate adaptation and mitigation practices, beliefs around climate change and anticipated climate impacts on the dairy industry, herd information, and producer demographics. We find that while dairy producers are adopting climate-smart practices relevant to the production systems in both countries, NZ producers (n = 306) displayed higher likelihood of adoption of emerging enteric mitigation strategies such as feed additives, selective breeding, and methane-inhibiting vaccines, as well as a higher proportion of anthropogenic climate change belief, compared with US producers (n = 920, approximately 700 full responses). Across both countries, cow welfare, farm profitability, and ensuring a viable farming operation for future generations were the top considerations when adopting new practices, suggesting these are critical to support farmers' climate-related strategy adoption. Despite having greater policy support and incentive programs for climate-smart practices, US producers were more likely to perceive initial cost and equipment barriers, to adopting climate-smart practices, while NZ producers were more likely to perceive information and technical assistance barriers. Finally, producers in both countries had high levels of uncertainty about how climate change may impact their operations, indicating that local and regionally appropriate climate risk extension and outreach engagement is important. These results provide key insights for stakeholders who seek to increase adoption of climate-smart dairy practices to meet industry and government expectations.