Keynote Speakers

Dr. Alfaro is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIA) in Chile. Her research field is nutrient cycling and GHG emissions from livestock systems. She has led national and international grants to develop country-specific emission factors, generate strategies for improving adaptation/mitigation in the agriculture sector, and provide training and capacity building for Latin-American countries. She has received national and international scientific awards and recognitions from scientific societies. She currently leads the team that estimates the Chilean agricultural sector inventory of GHG. In that capacity, she leads the roster of experts for the review of GHG inventories of Annex I Parties from the UNFCCC. She has been recently appointed as a member of the Scientific Council for Sustainable Agriculture of the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture.

Barbara is an Associate Professor for Environmental Engineering and Agricultural Engineering at the University of Zielona Góra, Poland, and a Senior Research Scientist and coordinator of the Research Programme “precision farming in crop and livestock production” at the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy in Potsdam, Germany. Having had many years of practical, hands-on experience in agriculture alongside extensive research experience, she completed her habilitation in Agricultural Engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna in 2007. In addition to her research, she sits on many panels looking at sustainable agriculture, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, European Innovation Partnership-AGRI and the FAO LEAP partnership. She is also the Co-Chair of the Agriculture and Nature Panel as part of the UNECE Task Force on Emission Inventories and Projections and of the Expert Panel on Mitigation of Agricultural Nitrogen under the UNECE Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen.

Claudia Arndt joined the Sustainable Livestock Systems Program as Senior Scientist and Co-leader of the Mazingira Centre in March 2021. Previously, she has been working as Associate Scientist on sustainable livestock systems at the National Agrarian University La Molina in Peru. Prior to that she worked at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (Spanish acronym CATIE) in Costa Rica. She was the on-the-ground coordinator of an international project called "Sustainable futures for the Costa Rica dairy sector: Optimizing environmental and economic outcomes” (SusCoRiDa) led by Bangor University in collaboration with Rothamsted Research. Before that she worked at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group in the US. Her research focuses on optimizing nutrient utilization efficiency to reduce the use of natural resources and environmental impact from livestock systems.

She holds a PhD in Dairy Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison (USA) and a MSc in Livestock Sciences as well as a BSc in Agricultural Sciences and Environmental Management from the Justus Liebig University of Giessen (Germany).

Dr. Jan Dijkstra is associate professor at the Animal Nutrition Group of Wageningen University (the Netherlands). He is also adjunct professor at the Department of Animal Biosciences, University of Guelph (Canada). After completing his PhD, he has held post-doc positions at the Biomathematics Group of the BBSRC Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at North Wyke Research Station, Okehampton, Devon (United Kingdom) and at the Animal Nutrition Group of Wageningen University (the Netherlands) appointed by the Dutch Royal Society for Sciences.

Dr. Dijkstra focuses mainly on challenges in dairy cattle nutrition aiming for healthy animals producing milk at low environmental costs. He is particularly interested in the importance of interplay between experimental research and modelling. Dr. Dijkstra conducts a broad-based experimental research programme to understand and quantify the relationships between diet quality or dietary additives and enteric methane emissions of dairy cattle. He is involved in further advancing mechanistic models of fermentation in cattle, that are applied as official IPCC Tier 3 approaches to estimate enteric methane emission by dairy cows for inventory purposes. Dr. Dijkstra has successfully trained 30 PhD students and currently supervises 6 PhD students. He is editor of 4 books and his publications comprise more than 270 papers in peer-reviewed journals with an h-index of 55 (ISI Web of Science).

Dr. Huhtanen received his MSc degree in Animal Science from the University of Helsinki in 1981 and PhD degree in 1987. Thereafter Dr. Huhtanen worked as Junior and Senior fellow of Academy of Finland at University of Helsinki. From 1994 to 2007 he worked as Professor and Research at Agricultural Research Center Finland. He has spent sabbatical at U.S. Dairy Research Center in two occasions 1992-93 and 2006. The research focused on developing omasal sampling system. In 2008 he joined Cornell University as an Associate Professor. In 2009 he got a Professor position at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. From 2019 he has also worked (50%) as Visiting Professor at Natural Resource Institute Finland. His primary research area is ruminant nutrition with special emphasis in forage evaluation and utilization, feed efficiency, greenhouse gas emission and nutrient excretions using both experimental and approaches. He has authored and co-authored about 230 papers published in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Frank Mitloehner is a professor and air quality specialist in cooperative extension in the Department of Animal Science at UC Davis. As such, he shares his knowledge and research, both domestically and abroad, with students, scientists, farmers and ranchers, policy makers, and the public at large. Frank is also director of the CLEAR Center, which has two cores – research and communications. The CLEAR Center brings clarity to the intersection of animal agriculture and the environment, helping our global community understand the environmental and human health impacts of livestock, so we can make informed decisions about the foods we eat and while reducing environmental impacts.

Frank is committed to making a difference for generations to come. He is passionate about understanding and mitigating air emissions from livestock operations, as well as studying the implications of these emissions on the health of farm workers and neighboring communities. In addition, he is focusing on the food production challenge that will become a global issue as the world’s population grows to nearly 10 billion by 2050.

Frank received a Master of Science degree in animal science and agricultural engineering from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and a doctoral degree in animal science from Texas Tech University. Frank was recruited by UC Davis in 2002, to fill its first-ever position focusing on the relationship between livestock and air quality.

Anne Mottet is a livestock development officer with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. She holds a MSc in agronomy and a PhD in Agro-ecosystems and has close to 20 years of experience in supporting policy makers and stakeholders for the transition to sustainable food systems. She has developed tools and carried out analysis and global assessments on topics related to livestock and animal products, natural resources, climate change and agroecology. Anne is a published author (over 4,000 citations), an elected member of the Scientific Advisory Board of The Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI) and an invited reviewer of IPCC reports and guidelines. Anne is currently coordinating a program of work providing technical support and guidance to countries and International Funding Institutions such as World Bank and IFAD on low carbon livestock development. She is also co-leading a program of work on technical support for a transition to sustainable food systems using a multicriteria assessment tool called TAPE, the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation.

Dr. Rotz is an Agricultural Engineer with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. His work has included the development, evaluation and application of a farm simulation model used to evaluate and compare the performance, economics, and environmental impacts of farming systems. Resent work includes life cycle assessment and sustainability of beef and dairy production and adaptation of farming systems to climate change. Al grew up on a dairy farm in southern Pennsylvania. He holds degrees from Elizabethtown College and The Pennsylvania State University. He spent three years as an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University before joining the Agricultural Research Service in 1981. For 16 years, he led the East Lansing Cluster of the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center. Since 1997, he serves as a lead scientist at the Pasture Systems and Watershed Management Research Unit in University Park, Pennsylvania. He is a registered Professional Engineer and a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. He is also a member of the American Dairy Science Association, the American Forage and Grassland Council, and the Pennsylvania Forage and Grassland Council.