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Conserving water and reviving a community

DairyGood.org

Across the country, farmers know that every drop of water counts. To help conserve this resource, one dairy in Western Kansas decided to take a chance on a one-of-its-kind partnership, which not only saved water, but also brought new life to its community.

In 2012, McCarty Family Farms in Rexford, partnered with Dannon to build a condensed milk processing plant that extracts more than 14 million gallons of water from the milk each year.

This has resulted in two big changes. First, since there’s less water in the milk, the family now uses 75 percent fewer trucks to take the milk to Dannon for use in making yogurt. Second, the family uses the water they take out of the milk to clean the milk plant, to provide drinking water for their cows, and eventually, to water their crops. This means that they can use less water than before.

This partnership also helped rejuvenate the community by bringing more than 100 jobs to the town, which was home to about 200 people in 2012, while also refurbishing homes for those families.

To learn more about how the McCarty family and why they won one of the six U.S. Dairy Sustainability Awards presented this year, watch this video.

Together, World Wildlife Fund and the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy are working to address these sustainability challenges and help feed a growing global population while maintaining a living planet. Since 2009, WWF and the Innovation Center have worked to advance mutual conservation goals and improve the environmental sustainability of the dairy industry. We are working together with the nation’s dairy farmers to develop, adopt and share new, science-based practices, leading to a more sustainable dairy industry.

This article is provided by DairyGood.org, a website promoting dairy farm families.