Lifecycle Assessment
Help Shape the Future of Dairy Goat Farming
We invite you to take part in a national research project focused on making dairy goat farming more sustainable, profitable, & resilient. With dairy goats becoming more popular for their adaptability & efficiency, it’s time to better understand how our farms impact the environment — & how we can improve.
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What's This About?
This project uses Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to study how goat farming affects the environment—greenhouse gases, water use, energy, and more. We’re gathering real data from farms like yours across the U.S. to build accurate models of goat production. We’re also looking at the economic benefits: We will evaluate cost of production and what farms are earning as revenues and assess how to optimize profits. The goal is to give back practical insights to farmers and policymakers to support both the environment and economic sustainability.
What We Need From You
We’ve developed a survey to document key inputs and outputs by understanding the day-to-day operations of your farm. Your privacy will be protected. Data will be kept confidential and used only for research to inform tools and policies that benefit dairy goat producers. The survey covers:
| 1. Housing, breeding, & rearing | 5. Water, fuel, & electricity use |
| 2. Feed systems & sources | 6. Labor, machinery, & processing |
| 3. Feed systems & sources | 7. Waste handling & operational costs |
| 4. Healthcare & veterinary services | |
How to Prepare
You can answer most questions from memory, but having a few records on hand can help:
| 1. Feed types & quantities | 5. Labor (paid & unpaid) |
| 2. Milk/meat sales (prices & channels) | 6. Equipment & barn info |
| 3. Veterinary & health cost | 7. Any processing or packaging activities |
| 4. Utility bills (water, fuel, & electricity) | |
Your Voice Matters
Let’s work together to strengthen the future of U.S. dairy goat farming. By sharing your experience, you help build better tools to:
Benchmark your farm’s performance
Ranges and percentiles for key metrics (e.g., milk per doe, cost of production, water & energy intensity, GHG per lb of milk) by herd size and production system.
Improve profitability & reduce costs
Typical cost curves and margin ranges, highlighting which cost lines usually drive profitability in farms like theirs.
Protect the environment for future generations
Scenario tables using typical values (e.g., switching feed source, adjusting lactation management) to show expected average impacts on costs and emissions.
The project is based at Iowa State University and the work is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative's Sustainable Agricultural Systems (SAS) program grant no. 2024-68012-41749 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.
