THE EFFECT OF GAP ON RAW MILK COMPLIANCE AND SUSTAINABILITY

Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) encompass food safety as well as a broad range of best practices associated with animal welfare, social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and risk management. The DSA established a best practice for on-farm dairy production into its GAP Audit Program. This project by the author cited aimed to determine whether the incorporation of GAPs, (DSA Code of Practice 2020), will contribute to meet sustainability objectives in South Africa's dairy industry by 2025 and examined the impact of implementing GAPs on raw milk compliance. The Response Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE 3.0) has been applied in the analyses in comparison.

Data from 152 DSA_GAP sustainability audits were analysed from commercial dairy farms across seven provinces, representing the four main milk-producing regions: Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Regions, and Western Cape. Herd sizes ranged from 50 to more than 1 000 lactating cows, encompassing a variety of production systems. The results demonstrated that regional context and institutional support frameworks have the most significant influence on GAP compliance and sustainability outcomes. Significant regional differences were observed, reflecting the importance of region-specific production environments and management systems.

Although pasture-based systems dominated nationally, farms operating Total Mixed Ration (TMR) systems showed greater resilience to risks with potential negative economic implications. Herd size had a significant effect on overall DSA_GAP sustainability scores, with smaller herds performing worse than medium and large operations. Farms receiving structured support from processors or extension services consistently achieved significantly higher compliance scores for both overall DSA_GAP sustainability criteria and specific compliance subthemes. These findings underscore the critical role of effective GAP implementation, supported by institutional structures, in advancing sustainability in the dairy industry.

Comparison with RISE 3.0 demonstrated selective alignment between DSA_GAP Sustainability and RISE 3.0 indicators, primarily within the social responsibility and material-use dimensions, while most environmental and risk-related sub-themes show weak or inconsistent monotonic relationships.  Although most sub-themes did not reach statistical significance, the overall positive directional trend across themes suggests conceptual alignment between compliance-based GAP implementation and broader sustainability performance. These findings support international evidence that structured management practices contribute positively to environmental and social sustainability outcomes and confirm that certification-based and performance-based frameworks capture overlapping but non-identical dimensions of sustainability.

A MSc thesis has been completed by the author, a scientific paper submitted to a reputable journal, and an Abstract submitted to the European Association for Animal Production’s (EAAP) Conference, the title being: A comparison of Good Agriculture Practices (GAPs) for sustainable dairy farming in South Africa with the RISE 3.0 (Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation) tool.