**5. Environmental consequences of dairying**

Livestock activities play a significant role in the maintenance of surrounding environment, including, air land, soil, and water. These may have direct impact on subsoil water, rivers, and lakes by adding solid waste and pollutants, which emits nutrients, organic matter, pathogens, and drug residues or indirect, in the form of competition for natural resources. Animals and their waste contribute to climate change by emitting greenhouse gases or by changing land use resulting from increased demand for feed grains and grazing. **Figure 6** shows a most recent estimate of greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock activities within agriculture sector of Pakistan.

### **5.1 Sources of environmental pollution**

The production systems and large dairy facilities have been identified as the two major sources of environmental degradation in Pakistan's dairy sector [2].

### *5.1.1 Production systems*

The data on the production systems indicate that there has been rapid growth in peri-urban and large peri-urban commercial dairy farming with intensive management conditions. This means that large numbers of animals are kept in small compounds. Under traditional management practices, the solid and liquid waste is often disposed of in major water bodies. Furthermore, the water used in farming operations is drained into main water resources. This not only contaminates public drinking water, but also leads to unchecked methane emissions. The second aspect of animal farming with respect to environmental consequences is the overgrazing and competition for food between animals and humans. The ever increasing livestock population [5] with poor level productivity poses serious threats on sustainability of range resources and cultivable lands for feed production [17].

### **Figure 6.**

*Total greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture sector in Pakistan. Source: FAOSTAT 2018 (accessed: September 25, 2018).* 
