The winner of last year's national 'Raising the Baa' competition has concluded carbon farming to offset a farm's own emissions cannot work under the present rules.
Western Victorian sheep producer Andrew Dufty won the competition after being judged as one of the best adopters of technology and labour efficiency in the sheep industry, together with his innovative management and environmental awareness.
- On farm carbon neutrality a pipe-dream without including soil carbon.
- Gross margin of up to $500/ha for trees in high rainfall zone, if carbon reaches $40 per tonne.
His prize, a $10,000 study tour to Europe to examine the impacts of environmental regulation on farming practices, has only aided his conclusion that carbon farming may not be a viable offset to traditional livestock production given the present trading rules.
Having planted 250 hectares or 17pc of his 1452ha western Victorian farm to woodlots and shelterbelts, he aimed to offset the emissions from his 11,000 sheep flock and 400ha cropping enterprises but has come to the conclusion that it is not viable.
As a trial, 57ha of shelterbelts have been measured for carbon sequestration and this has been estimated to lock up the equivalent of about 3400 tonnes of carbon dioxide over 17 years, based on a calculation of just under 200t sequestered annually or 3.5t/ha/year.
The estimations have been put together through Carbonsmart, a Landcare initiative that helps existing farmers join the carbon sequestration industry.
Based on present production estimates, Mr Dufty's property, Melville Forest, emits some 2250t of CO2 equivalents per year.
To offset this would take 580ha of plantations or 40pc of the property.
The important assumption in these calculations is that the only avenue available to offset livestock emissions is planting trees.
Even if Mr Dufty was able to change his farm management to increase carbon in the soil, this extra sequestered soil carbon could not be counted as part of his farm emissions inventory.
Under the present Emissions Trading Rules defined under the Kyoto Protocol and ratified by the Australian government, soil carbon is not included and agriculture is not expected to join the scheme until 2015.
Therefore, Mr Dufty would receive no credit for any additional carbon he manages to sequester in the soil, and no credit for any action he takes prior to 2015.
According to the Australian Farm Institute executive director, Mick Keogh, soil carbon, which technically includes the pasture and dry matter produced by the soil, has been excluded from the scheme because events such as bushfires would represent a catastrophic loss of stored carbon and such a "carbon reduction event" would be extremely expensive for governments, or for individual businesses that were required to include those emissions in their annual carbon accounts.
Mr Keogh says including agriculture in an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to offset carbon emissions could well be more damaging to agriculture than climate change itself over the next few decades, given the carbon emitted by livestock as well as the increase in carbon-reliant inputs such as fertilizer and fuel.
Australian Farm Institute research has identified that, under current emission accounting rules, a 'model farm' running 8800 dry sheep equivalents and sowing 430 hectares of crop each year would be estimated to be producing some 1800t of CO2 equivalents per year.
A model farm with 1475 cattle and similar crop area would be estimated to be producing approximately 2439t of carbon dioxide equivalents per year.
However, without credit for the enormous volume of carbon taken up and stored by soils and pasture, livestock farmers have little hope of surviving if they are made responsible for the costs of estimated farm emissions.
Even if only responsible for the cost of 10pc of their farm emissions (as the Government has proposed for after 2015) this would dramatically reduce farm profitability and competitiveness according to Mr Keogh.
Moreover, his calculations suggest carbon farming using single-species tree plantations could generate a gross margin per hectare of up to $500, based on a future carbon price of $40/t.
Such a gross margin for forestry plantations could see livestock farming displaced across a wide area of the high rainfall zone of rural Australia, as was identified in a recent ABARE report carried out as part of the Australian Government’s modelling of the cost of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
The Farm Institute has based its assumptions on the ability of a plantation to sequester 25t of carbon per hectare annually but Mr Dufty said CarbonSmart calculated the real figure on his property closer to 3.5t.
Mr Dufty is very sceptical about the present rules and regulations, with politics seemily so far ahead of any reliable science based policy.
"There seems to be a lot of noise in government that we can sell surplus carbon to provide another income stream, however based on the numbers coming out of our trial we will need all the sequestration to offset our own production and our production will have to be reduced in order to balance the carbon ledger. It doesn’t add up."
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