NUE

Nutrient Use Efficiency (NUE) shows how effectively your farm uses nitrogen to produce milk, meat, and crops. It’s like a performance scorecard that compares the amount of nitrogen applied to the amount of product generated.

In the Milk Sustainability Center, NUE is calculated at three levels:

• Farm NUE: the overall efficiency of nitrogen use across your entire farm

• Barn NUE: how efficiently your herd converts nitrogen into milk and meat

• Field NUE: how efficiently your crops use nitrogen from manure and fertilizers

Improving NUE helps reduce nitrogen losses to the environment, lowers input costs, and supports more sustainable farming.