Arla is a farmer-owned cooperative comprising over 8,900 farmers from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with ownership of over 1.5 million dairy cattle.

In 2020, the company began annual data collection under its Climate Check initiative, which features over 200 questions on subjects such as feed, energy use and manure management, and allows for the calculation of the carbon footprint of milk production on Arla farms. Participation in the scheme is voluntary for conventional producers and mandatory for organic producers, with farmer owners paid an incentive on their milk price to complete the Climate Check survey.
Building on the Climate Check tool, Arla has introduced a point-based Sustainability Incentive model to help fund and motivate actions required to hit its 30% emissions reduction target by 2030 against a 2015 baseline. Under this model, farmers can collect points based on their environmental sustainability activities under 19 different levers. Levers with the biggest potential to reduce a farm’s carbon footprint (including e.g. feed efficiency, fertiliser use, land use, protein efficiency, sustainable feed) are associated with a higher total amount of points available. Not all levers have a direct influence on the farm’s carbon footprint.

The model currently allows farmers to score of maximum 80 points, but more options for sustainable actions will be built into the scheme over time, with a maximum of 100 points to be made available in the future. Farmers will receive 1 eurocent per kilo milk for submitting climate check data, which is the prerequisite for receiving the sustainability incentive, and, in addition, they will receive 0.03 eurocent per kilo milk per point awarded in the sustainability incentive model. In the first full year, at least 270 million euro is expected to be distributed through the monthly milk price with an estimated average of 39 points scored.