Economic and Environmental Tradeoffs of Forage Systems in Climate-Adaptive Dairy Production

Agricultural decision-making depends on tools that quantify whole-system tradeoffs under climate and market volatility, but significant gaps remain in understanding how these tools perform at the farm scale under real-world constraints. For dairy production systems, transitioning from corn silage monoculture to diversified forage systems offers a pathway toward greater sustainability under global change. However, market and policy constraints, including crop insurance structures, continue to challenge farmers’ willingness to adopt adaptive strategies. To address these barriers, we evaluated six cropping systems: Corn silage as a baseline, corn followed by a cover crop (CCC), corn interseeded with alfalfa (CAL), alfalfa (ALF), intermediate wheatgrass (IWG), and multi-species pasture (PAS) in a two-year field experiment in Wisconsin, USA. Environmental sustainability was quantified through depth-resolved soil C, N, P, K stocks using equivalent soil mass, bulk density, hydrological metrics, and microbial diversity, integrated into a composite soil health index (SHI). Economic outcomes included net returns on a forage basis, potential milk production, risk-adjusted metrics under historical price variability and stress scenarios, and an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio analysis.

Corn-based systems maximized energy-corrected milk per hectare and minimized land use per cow but exhibited the lowest SHI and greatest downside risk under price shocks. CCC and PAS improved SHI and reduced costs relative to Corn, while ALF delivered high per-cow profitability with limited soil health gains. CAL provided intermediate returns with greater variability, and IWG offered strong soil benefits at higher cost. These results reveal a fundamental tradeoff: Corn-centric systems prioritize short-term yield and land efficiency, whereas perennial systems enhance long-term soil resilience and economic stability. This is because pasture-based diets require no concentrate supplementation, reducing feed costs and input dependency, while all corn-based systems rely heavily on concentrates to sustain high milk yields, which increases their vulnerability to market shocks. Greater input requirements for corn further compound this risk. In our study, pasture systems offered profitable alternatives to corn silage diets and improved risk management, which can reduce reliance on crop insurance. By integrating biophysical indicators with risk-aware economics, our framework identifies diversified forage strategies as adaptive pathways that enhance resilience to climate variability and economic shocks. While these findings reflect a single soil type, the approach provides a scalable method for evaluating tradeoffs in agricultural systems under global change.