Welcome to the Future Dairy's online portal,

FutureDairy is a research program to help Australia's dairy farmers manage the challenges they are likely to face during the next 20 years. The challenges are expected to be related to:

• The availability and cost of land and water resources
• The availability and cost of labour and associated lifestyle issues

FutureDairy is a strategic investment on the industry’s behalf, to improve lifestyle and productivity in the long term.

FutreDairy started in 2004, exploring opportunities for productivity gains by substantially increasing forage and feed production and utilisation on farm and technological innovations with the potential greatest impact on farmers' lifestyle labour management.

PROJECT STAGES

The project comprises 2 phases.

Phase 1, from 2004 to 2008 was unique in that all work carried out considered science, systems and people issues with all these different disciplines being part of the project team and interacting at project management level. We explored how our findings work under commercial conditions through partner farms. This allowed us to study how technical issues are affected by 'people' issues that can make a difference between a technology being used on-farm or not.

For further readings please visit our Information Sheets and Technical Notes sections.

In Phase 2, from 2008 to 2011 and in alignment with the restructure of all RD&E investments by the dairy industry, FutureDairy is still addressing science, system and people issues but through interactions and collaborative work with other research projects and extension departments in Australia.