No more business as usual

The drive to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions will have to start down on the farm.

The farming sector must make big changes if New Zealand is to move to a low-emissions economy, the Productivity Commission report concludes. Greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture rose 16% between 1990 and 2015, driven mostly by a doubling of the dairy herd and a five-fold increase in the use of nitrogen fertilisers.

The farming sector has long argued against being included in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) because there are no technological solutions to methane emissions from ruminant animals and nitrous-oxide emissions from agricultural soil. But the commission says farm-management practices exist that could reduce emissions by up to 15% without reducing profits, including lower stocking rates, reducing nitrogen-rich supplementary feed and fertiliser, once-aday milking, and removing stock from wet winter soil.

The commission says if the sector was included in the ETS, there would be greater incentive to adopt such practices, as well as encouraging land-use change towards forestry and lower-emitting horticulture.

However, because agriculture is highly exposed to international competition, it should initially receive free allocation of carbon credits.

Despite years of research, technological solutions to agricultural emissions are still several years away, the commission says. Work is under way on a methane inhibitor that could achieve a 20% reduction, but a product will not be available until at least 2023. Research on a methane vaccine is in its early stages, but there is no guarantee of success and a commercial product will “almost certainly” not be available before 2030.

Some animals do have genetic traits causing them to emit less methane, but selectively breeding such traits through the entire population would take decades.