No reason to demonise farming
OPINION: New Zealand has said it is going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by ‘a lot’ and ‘in a short time’. One of those gases is methane. Our biggest producer of methane is livestock farming.
That was one of the messages from the chair of the Climate Change Commission, Dr Rod Carr, a keynote speaker at last week's Agriculture and Climate Change conference in Wellington.
More than 400 delegates attended the two-day event and heard from a wide range of speakers on topics like market drivers for agricultural emissions reduction, investment in new technologies and the emission targets and tools to deal with them.
Carr says in the case of the dairy industry, it's likely that a solution will be found in the form of a vaccine or bolus to deal with methane emissions because of the profitability of that sector.
"If it costs $50 per animal a year to vaccinate or put a bolus or whatever down the down the gut of a cow, the dairy industry can afford that cost and still be profitable," Carr says.
But he says the same can't be said for the sheep and wool industry. He notes that with just under 25 million sheep, producing $4.4 billion worth of meat and wool, farmers are only getting about $180 in gross revenue per animal.
"Consequently, they don't have any margin to pay for methane emissions technology and I think this cost should be taken up and be paid within the dairy sector. I don't know how we get a methane technology that works for pastoral sheep farming in NZ that is affordable to farmers given the current value of the product they produce," he says.
Conversely, Carr says the dairy industry is more profitable in most ways in terms of methane emissions than sheep farmers, including per hectare of land, per hour of labour and gross revenue per hectare of land.
