Australia’s first carbon-neutral cattle sale took place this week.
On Thursday, 700 Angus breeding cows and heifers raised using carbon-neutral farming methods were slaughtered at a saleyard in the small town of Gloucester, a three-hour drive from Sydney.
In theory, the farm sequesters more carbon than the cows emit, so every cow at auction has net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from birth to the date of sale.
The cattle were raised by fourth-generation farmer Robert McKenzie.
“I’m doing it for my family and to show farmers this is possible,” he said. “I have two sons who will eventually take over the business, and they are part of a generation where sustainability is important.”
The sale is an important proof of concept for Australia’s red meat industry, which is targeting net-zero sector-wide emissions by 2030. In other words, is producing net-zero cattle worth the cost?
How can live cows be carbon neutral?
Well, individual animals still have spontaneous emissions. However, in theory, it could be incorporated into supply chains that achieve carbon neutrality.
Mackenzie’s livestock business, Macca’s Pastoral, uses soil carbon sequestration to offset greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases include methane emitted by cattle, vehicles, and electricity generation.
In 2022, it hired agricultural consultants Agricore to take soil carbon samples across its 6,500 hectare holding.
The farm then uses intensive stock rotation, planting more diverse combinations of grass species, and targeted organic fertilizers to improve landscape health, improve productivity, and increase soil carbon. Introduced new management techniques such as the use of
In 2023, A further 1,400 soil samples were taken and found to sequester 540kg of CO2 per hectare and increase soil carbon by an average of 40%. Results for 2024 are pending. According to Agricore, this means the farm was storing more carbon in the ground than the total emissions it emitted in the same year.
This carbon accounting approach is known as “insetting,” where on-farm carbon sequestration is counted against a farm’s operational emissions to reach net zero.
How can you make your farm net zero?
Agricore Director Hayden Hollis said annual soil carbon testing across Mackenzie Farms was carried out in accordance with Clean Energy Regulator (CER) guidelines. Although the regulator’s methodology is widely used in industry, a consortium of Australian soil scientists claims the plan has flaws, including:be addressed as an urgent matter”.
Agricore’s data is proprietary and was not available to Guardian Australia.
One of those scientists is Dr Elaine Mitchell from the Queensland University of Technology. She says it typically takes at least a five-year interval to detect statistically significant changes in soil carbon.
Professor Richard Eckardt, an agricultural economist at the University of Melbourne, said: Soil carbon should be measured on a 10-year moving average to account for seasonal variations. 70% of this is determined by rainfall patterns.
He said success cannot be determined until the next step. “It resolves rainfall variability and reflects true management. ”
Eckerd said the margin of error during sampling is about 20%, and there is an additional 10% variation in laboratory analysis. “Annual changes in soil carbon are simply buried in the noise of errors in our ability to measure soil carbon.”
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Can soil carbon sequestration reduce livestock emissions?
Pastures have the potential to store vast amounts of carbon; These gains are never permanent and slow down over time.
Like Macca’s Pastoral, Jigsaw Farm in western Victoria set its livestock emissions to achieve carbon neutrality, but this was only possible for seven years.
Hollis said the Mackenzie Soil Carbon Project is in its early stages and will continue to see increases in soil carbon. “But like any landscape, at some point you reach production capacity,” he said. “Unfortunately, that is the reality.”
If that happens, Hollis said, farms will have to find other ways to reduce or reduce livestock emissions, such as planting trees or breeding faster-growing cattle.
A global study led by Wageningen University in the Netherlands found that short-term data suggests that under the right conditions, such as in the high-rainfall areas where Makka’s Pastoral is based. Carbon sequestration can be used to reduce emissions from grazing systems.
However, in the long run, “Overly optimistic and potentially misleading” and “has limited role in mitigating climate warming.”
Farmers also have the option of using their carbon gains to obtain Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCU) through CER, with the assistance of a ‘carbon developer’. These credits can be bought and sold by large polluters to offset their own CO2 emissions, or used to deduct on-farm emissions and become certified carbon neutral by the government’s Climate Active program. can do.
There are currently 528 soil carbon projects registered under the ACCU scheme. criticized by scientists. So far he has been issued 7 credits.
What’s the market for carbon-neutral cattle like?
Coles supermarkets stock a wide range of products carbon neutral beef and pork We buy directly from producers like Jigsaw Farm and command a premium price for our cattle. But the Gloucester sale is the first public cattle auction where traders have marketed their cattle as carbon neutral.
Wynand Snyman, chief executive of online livestock market Auction Plus, which organized the sale, said livestock emissions reporting was still in its early stages.
The average price for the entire sale was $1,753, with a top price of $4,300 for heifers tested for pregnancy in calf. But buyers were primarily drawn to the cows’ genetics, not their carbon footprint.
Farmer Bill McDonald purchased 13 Mackenzie cows. “At the end of the day, they were good cows with good genetics,” he said. “And I’m working towards carbon neutrality, so that’s a bonus.”
