At Challenge Butter, we’ve been churning quality butter for over 100 years. As a cooperative of family-owned farms, sustainability isn’t just an initiative—it’s a tradition.
Project Sunshine is an ongoing commitment to maintaining excellence and making progress in four critical categories:
Challenge is a cooperative association of about 300 dairy farm families. As a co-op, our member-owners have a shared commitment to meet and exceed sustainability best practices.
As part of California Dairies, Inc., our farmers and we focus on quantifying and aggregating information about sustainability efforts to better our products and services for the animals, consumers, and environment.
We follow Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) standards and we were one of the initial participants. We have also adopted the globally recognized standard of the Five Freedoms of Good Animal Welfare.
We follow the 5 Freedoms of Good Animal Welfare: 1 – Adequate food & water. 2 – Comfort & shelter. 3 – Proper handling. 4 – Prevention & treatment of disease & injury. 5 – Minimization of fear, stress, and suffering.
Our members have zero tie stall facilities or cow-trainers, ensuring for better animal health, comfort, and freedom of movement.
100% of our family dairy farms are participating in and are in good standing with the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) animal care program.
We have expanded our accounting of GHG emissions throughout the supply chain from farm to customer. This includes detailed metric tracking on-farm, throughout the transportation network, and within our milk processing facilities.
Our goals are led by the US Dairy Industry.
Over the past decade, GHG emissions per gallon of milk used to make Challenge Butter decreased by more than 5%. We’re on track to cut emissions by 15% in 2025 and 20% in 2030.
Challenge dairy farmers are on track to reduce methane emissions from manure by 40% in 2030.
We signed the 2050 Environmental Stewardship Goals, which includes reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.
66% of CDI milk is produced on farms implementing one or more project to reduce methane, the largest on-farm GHG contributor.
FARM Environmental Stewardship evaluations are performed on one-third of our member-owner farms each year. These evaluations help us track member-owner farm’s GHG emissions and reductions.
Our member-owner farms exercise practices and processes focused on the responsible use of water, a scarce and precious resource.
CDI farms are located in and solely operate in California.
Through ongoing water conservation efforts, the amount of water needed to feed cows and produce milk in California has decreased more than 88% over the past 50-plus years.
About 40% of a California dairy cow’s diet consists of agricultural byproducts, which significantly reduces the amount of water needed for feed.*
Since 2014, the CDI Tipton manufacturing facility has recharged more than 2.8 billion gallons of water to the local aquifer. That’s nearly 1 million gallons of treated water returned daily to the environment.*
Our member-owner farms are helping to shrink our collective energy-use footprint to unprecedented levels and foster California’s ambitious transition to clean, renewable transportation fuels.
Almost half of our member farms have installed solar energy projects that supply California’s grid with clean, renewable electricity.
30% of all milk produced by our member farms comes from farms that are using a manure digester to capture methane and create renewable energy.*
More than 55% of the electricity used in our processing facilities is from renewable or carbon-free energy sources.*
The number of tie stall facilities on our member farms.
Challenge Dairy Products, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of California Dairies, Inc. that represents about 300 dairy farm families.
Of our farms are family owned and operated, with the exception of our University-owned educational farm.
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