Forage systems for less GHG emission and more soil carbon sink in continental and Mediterranean agricultural areas Dairy farm COMAZZI e PIGATTO COMAZZI&PIGATTO farm is located in Marano Ticino in the province of Novara, an area characterized by an extensive and mixed cropping system management. The farm rears, on average, 205 milking+dry cows and 139 heifers (from birth through calving), and cultivates 87 tillable hectares of land (rain-fed). The intensity of milk production is approximately 23.5 t/ha per year. The soils are well drained with prevailing loam textures (0-30 cm horizon). The farm had been managed, in the last decade, with a conventional forage system based on mono-cropped corn and it is shifting toward a high quality forage system. Today, the double Italian ryegrass-corn crop occupies about 20% of the UAA, whereas alfalfa and grass meadow are grown on more than 50% of the UAA. The corn is harvested as whole plant silage or whole ear silage, whereas grass and legume forages are cut at an early stage of growth and harvested as wilted silages. Forage4climate is a LIFE Climate Change Mitigation Project The four-year project aims to demonstrate how agricultural systems related to milk production can contribute to the mitigation of climate change through: LIFE15 CCM/IT/000039 forage4climate.crpa.it • the adoption of good agricultural and farming practices that can be useful to limit GHG emissions and to maintain or increase carbon sink in soils (arable land, meadows and pastures) used to produce forages for ruminants (cattle, sheep and goats); • the development and dissemination of tools for accounting carbon stock and GHG emissions in order to evaluate the effects of mitigation interventions. Today the baseline values of GHG emissions are 1.2 kg of CO2 equivalents for cow’s milk and 3.2 kg of CO2 equivalents for sheep and goat’s milk in the areas of the project. However, Forage4Climate believes that it is possible to reduce the average carbon footprint of the production of 1 kg of milk by 5%. This would represent a reduction in The actions of the project will take place in 3 Regions of the Po Valley (Piedmont, Lombardy and Emilia - Romagna), in Sardinia and in 4 emissions of 740,000 tons of CO2 equivalents per year for Greek regions (Peloponnese, Thessaly, Sterea Ellada and Epirus) milk production in Italy and Greece..