It’s exciting news for farmers who are under pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with new regulations set to tax them for those emissions from next year. I said recently the agriculture sector needs to get on board with this. In both a physical and optical sense, addressing the issue is the only way forward. It will make our customers and the planet happy. But the accounting system needs to be fair and if farmers are sitting on carbon sinks in the form of pasture they need to be able to get the credit for that, especially if they’re forced to pay the price for the biological greenhouse gases their animals produce.
A recent story in a Scottish farming newspaper said regulators there are moving towards including pasture in the carbon equation and it will paint a rosier picture for livestock farmers there. The phrase carbon neutral was mentioned. It’s early days for the science here and there are a lot of variables – tillage, fertiliser use and amount of grass eaten in every rotation spring to mind. The results of this research might be some way off but the science in this whole space is always evolving.
That’s no reason to sit and wait, though. People want action on climate change and agriculture has been sitting on the sidelines for some time. Now it’s in, though with a 95% discount. That gives the industry more time to do the research, look at on-farm practice and foster an industry that’s sustainable, profitable and revered.
And who knows, we might find out the silver bullet for the industry was under our feet this whole time.
Bryan Gibson
