Saturation point: Australia’s best known carbon-neutral farm can no longer offset its emissions
Mark Wootton and his wife, Eve Kantor, were the carbon-neutral pioneers of Australia’s red meat industry.
Years before the Paris agreement to keep global heating below 1.5C, and a decade before the Australian government committed to reaching net zero emissions, their family farm in southwestern Victoria was declared carbonneutral.
“In the early 2010s we were pretty cocky that we had conquered this thing,” Wootton says. “We thought we’d cracked the formula.”
Jigsaw Farms, a mosaic of lush pastures, eucalypt plantations, wildlife corridors and wetlands about 250km west of Melbourne, near the town of Hamilton, was the envy of the industry. It was lionised by the media, a favoured photo opportunity by politicians and held up by the red meat sector as a vision of the future.
The farm’s carbon-rich soils, 20% of which were forested, sequestered enough CO2 to offset its annual emissions from wool, lamb and beef production.
Or at least it did. The latest report tracking Jigsaw’s emissions, which is now undergoing peer review, confirmed that since about 2017 – the same year the industry body Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) announced a target of net zero emissions by 2030 – Jigsaw Farms has been emitting more greenhouse gases than it could sequester.
“Cows and sheep are still there producing the same amount of methane [every year], but the trees grow up and carbon sequestration slows down,” says the report author, Prof Richard Eckard.
Eckard is an agricultural economist and the director of the school of agriculture, food and ecosystem sciences at the University of Melbourne. He became involved in measuring Jigsaw’s emissions a decade ago.
The 3,378-hectare farm spans six titles, bought by Wootton and Kantor between 1996 and 2003. Hardwood timber plantations cover 295 hectares, 24 hectares is remnant forest and a further 268 hectares are set aside for biodiversity. It hosts a fine wool merino operation with about 20,000 ewes, and 550 head of cattle.
Sign up to receive Guardian Australia’s fortnightly Rural Network email newsletter
Initially, the hundreds and thousands of trees they planted, combined with a switch to perennial grasses, significantly increased the amount of carbon sequestered on the property.
But those trees have now matured and passed peak sequestration, meaning they absorb less C02-year-on-year, and the soil is so carbon rich it can’t sequester any additional C02 from the atmosphere.
“Ten years later it all slows down because carbon saturation,” Eckard says. “It’s just the law of diminishing returns.”
The latest Jigsaw study estimated that in 2021, the farm sequestered 70.3% to 83.2% of its annual emissions. By 2031, as the farm’s forests grow older, models predict it will absorb just over half of what it did when carbon sequestration peaked in 2012.
The dilemma Jigsaw now faces reflects the broader challenge of decarbonising Australia’s red meat industry, Eckard says.
The industry claims it has reduced its emissions by 65% compared with 2005 levels, but this reduction relies on recorded decreases in deforestation and increases in forest regrowth, which some analysis suggests is overstated.
“Carbon sequestration through forestry is a short-term buy out of trouble,” Eckard says. “You can plant your way out of trouble and, like Jigsaw, get seven years of net zero, but ultimately, unless you do something about the methane, you’re not going to stay net zero.”
Climate neutrality v the ‘seaweed solution’
Other efforts to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint have focused on attempting to reduce the amount of methane expelled from the rumen, which accounts for 80% of the sector’s emissions. MLA has put more than $180m towards the problem, with no solution forthcoming.The results from the longest running commercial trial of a seaweed cow-feed, which aimed to cut methane by more than 80%, were lacklustre.
Selective breeding and dietary changes can help, says Eckard, but it’s slow going.
“It took the animal 50m years to evolve to produce meat and eat grass the way it does,” he says. “That can’t be overcome in three-year funding rounds.”
But he says that if producers adopt current best practices that will reduce their emissions intensity per kilogram of meat produced while research finds the “seaweed solution”.
On Jigsaw Farms, high reproductive rates, fast-growing livestock due to genetic selection and ample feed, and grazing stock at double the density of other farms in the district helps reduce the emissions that go into producing each animal.
“If that lamb or calf grows faster, so it gets to market quicker, so it grows faster, so, to be brutal, it can die and be eaten – your carbon intensity is dropping,” Wootton says.
This allows Jigsaw to sell its wool, lamb and beef at a premium in a market that is increasingly looking for farmers who can demonstrate strong environmental credentials.
This is particularly important for the export-focused Australian market, Eckard says. Seventy per cent of Australian-grown beef is sold into global supply chains ruled by international corporations, all of whom have net zero targets.
That’s the impetus behind the MLA’s “world leading” net zero target. This month Guardian Australia reported that the industry body described the target as “aligning the industry” towards improvement and said it did not need to be met, though it remains committed to the goal. Environmental scientists say reporting on the goal is based on unreliable land clearing data.
David Jochinke, the president of the National Farmers Federation, says the target is about the “aspiration” towards decarbonisation.
“We’ve always said at the NFF, we’re not going to reduce production in an attempt to get to net zero,” he says. “Will we make it? I’m not really sure, but we are going to give it a red hot go.”
A 2023 CSIRO report found the industry would fall short of the net zero goal and recommended a “climate-neutral” target be adopted instead, which would theoretically be achieved by reaching a point where the sector no longer causes any additional warming to the planet.
Australia’s peak cattle body, Cattle Australia, has also called for a shift to climate neutrality. But both Eckard and Wootton say the industry shouldn’t change course.
“I fear that if the industry fiddled with the metric what they would be effectively saying is ‘methane is no longer an issue so we don’t have to worry about it’,” Eckard says.
The director of the Australian National University Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Mark Howden, says that unachievable or “false [climate] targets” are ineffective and can alienate both industries and the public.
He says the red meat sector’s goal is “in a sense the wrong target”. “We do need to go net zero in terms of C02, but in the case of methane we need to reduce it by about two-thirds in the long term to effectively meet the Paris agreement,” he says.
Wootton says the benefits of their regenerative approach to farming persist even if the farm’s carbon accounts are now in the red.
They did not initially set out to be carbon-neutral. The timber plantations were established on Jigsaw Farms to offer an alternative source of income. They planted permanent native vegetation to encourage biodiversity and shelter belts to protect livestock, and dug deep dams so they would always have a secure water supply.
A bird survey in 1996 found 46 bird species on the land. Today, there are 174. The land is healthier – that is, ironically, why carbon sequestration has stabilised.
“People come to us and go, shit, if they can’t go carbon-neutral, what does that mean for us,” Wootton says.
“It means you’ll have to do some of what we’ve done, do things differently from what we’ve done, and do some other things that we don’t even know we can do yet.
“There’s no silver bullet here, but there’s some silver buckshot, hopefully.”
Sign up for the Rural Network email newsletter
Join the Rural Network group on Facebook to be part of the community