Turning red meat green
The 2030 goal for carbon neutral beef
SUSTAINABILITY is one of those buzzwords overused for so long they’ve lost their zing.
And that’s a shame, because the idea should be front of mind as the north plans how to develop and grow into the 21st century.
Way back in 1987, the United Nations report Our Common Future deemed development to be sustainable only if it assured “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Variations on this theme have waxed and waned since, but the original statement gives as good a sense as any of the notion that we shouldn’t be “eating the future.”
These days when evaluating development options many speak of a triple bottom line, where social, economic and environmental imperatives are delicately balanced. The reality is that political agendas and vested interests more often govern the final decision. The cattle industry often finds itself in the firing line over its sustainability, especially for its contribution to climate change where 11.6 per cent of human-related greenhouse gas emissions are traceable globally to ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats.
So it was exciting to hear Meat and Livestock Association managing director Richard Norton announce an ambitious goal for Australia’s red meat industry to become carbon neutral by 2030, at the organisation’s annual general meeting at Alice Springs in November. The goal is based around CSIRO research commissioned by the MLA, the results of which are due to be published next month.
Were such a highly desirable goal for a sustainable beef industry to be reached, Australia would
be the first nation to do so.
Pastoralists had already taken heart from an eight-year project investigating methane emissions from the Australian beef and dairy industries, which found cattle emissions were 24 per cent lower than previously thought.
In fact, brahman cattle fed various tropical grasses emitted up to 30 per cent less methane than formerly determined. And recently it has been suggested that grazing systems might have a role to play in storing carbon from the atmosphere, thereby helping offset grazing’s contribution to climate change. For example, research at Arizona State University into Adaptive Multi-Paddock grazing investigated “small-sized fields to provide short periods of grazing for livestock and long recovery periods for fields.” The focus was on whether the methods could store carbon in the soil, and if so, which was most successful. At a global conference on sustainable beef in Alberta in 2016,
Professor of Sustainability and Journalism at Arizona State University Peter Byck noted that soils may store more carbon than plants or the atmosphere, and that AMP grazing could store 6.7 tonnes per hectare more than conventional grazing each year. Another research group evaluated European grazing systems on the premise that the potential for grasslands to be a sink for carbon is “enormous in Europe.” While soil is widely acknowledged as the main terrestrial reservoir of carbon, such studies can, nevertheless, produce contradictory results.
A report called Grazed and Confused from the Food Climate Research Network at Oxford, with input from CSIRO, concluded grass-fed cattle production generates much more greenhouse gas than it stores, making its role in a sustainable future questionable.
The report notes that ruminants “emit large quantities of methane, use vast tracts of land, and are held responsible for a host of
environmental ills, most notably climate change, deforestation and biodiversity loss, as well as the pollution of soils, air and water. “Beef is bad, it is argued.” But there was also some good news.
Vital to many economies, “cattle and other ruminants can be reared on land unsuited to other food-producing purposes and on by-products, and that in mixed farming systems the animals recycle nutrients and re-fertilise soils with their dung, thus fostering a new generation of crops and pasture.”
There has also been important research in Australia’s north, where savanna woodlands at Howard Spring, for example, have been shown to be a net carbon sink. Nonetheless, the beef industry is responsible for 7-9 per cent of national reportable greenhouse gas emissions owing to “livestock methane, savanna burning, vegetation clearing and land degradation.”
Perhaps most useful to
review is the Climate Clever Beef project (2012-15), especially in view of CSIRO’s expected unveiling of its latest research findings next month.
The project set out to evaluate the notion of carbon farming, to help the beef industry deal with climate change by improving the methane emission intensity of cattle production, and increasing the amount of carbon stored in soils and vegetation. A collaborative program across five regions between the NT, WA and federal governments as well as the MLA, the research evaluated management options at specific sites in the Queensland Gulf, Fitzroy Basin and Victoria River Districts. In a final revision of the report published late in 2015, the authors noted that the project trialled on-farm practices to test the carbon storage and methane reduction objectives.
The work also used modelling techniques to test and develop the business case for integrating such methods into farm management.
At the heart of the evaluation were economic viability, productivity and optimising environmental outcomes for sustainability.
The report concludes that grazing management could “substantially increase the average amount of carbon stored in vegetation, particularly in grassed landscapes.”
Furthermore, reductions of 10 to 30 per cent in livestock methane emissions intensity were achieved by livestock management strategies that included “improving weaning rates, increasing lifetime reproductive performance and improving growth rates.”
Nevertheless, the scope for Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) projects aimed at soil carbon sequestration across the majority of northern Australia grazing land was judged as limited.
This was due to “high project risk”, even though “soil carbon was found to increase when cropping land was converted to pasture.”
Importantly, a “reduction in total emissions was only achieved when stocking rates were reduced which can have a significant impact on business profitability through reduced sales, even if individual livestock productivity is improved.”
The ERF fund issues Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) for every tonne of carbon emissions reduced or avoided through a project’s activities. The credits can then be sold to the government under a contract or on a secondary carbon market.
In a press release last week, the Clean Energy Regulator claimed Australia’s agricultural sector had halved its greenhouse gas emissions in the past twenty years, at the same time trumpeting opportunities for the land sector. Climate Clever Beef has been an invaluable step toward understanding what sustainability may look like in the North.
Let’s hope next month’s CSIRO report can balance the possibilities of such research with the constraints of a federal ERF framework.