In the third of our Net Zero: The Road to 2050 podcasts, Nikki Mandow turns her attention to the most contentious sector when it comes to our climate change goals - agriculture.
Agriculture usually jostles with tourism as our biggest export earner, but these days it certainly has the upper hand. It also appears to have the upper hand when it comes to battling the Government on climate change moves.
The ‘backbone of the country’ is also its Achilles heel when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, it’s still pretty much on a get-out-of-jail-free pass when it comes to action.
Historically, even suggestions of action have been dashed. Take for instance the annual research levy on farmers proposed in 2003 by Labour’s then-climate change minister Pete Hodgson, which would have cost each farm an estimated average of $300 a year.
The way the ‘research levy’ morphed in the public mind into the infamous ‘fart tax’ and the accompanying protest is a classic example of orchestrated and successful resistance, boiling a difficult and complex subject down to a joke about cow farts.
Politicians caved, and the levy was dropped.
Award-winning social justice documentary maker Alister Barry made a film about that lack of progress in 2014. It portrays a landscape of successive environment and climate change ministers, increasingly concerned to get legislation through around climate change, but being generally out-manoeuvred by well-funded and influential corporate and industry lobby groups. Among them, farmers.
In the latest podcast in our series Net zero: The road to 2050, Nikki Mandow speaks to Greenpeace’s lead agriculture campaigner, Christine Rose, about the fact that almost half of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture – methane and nitrous oxide.
Yet while we are increasingly making other industry sectors pay for their emissions, somehow we still have not decided what to do about all those emissions from mainstream farming - dairy, sheep and beef."
“That privileged status of agriculture in New Zealand actually stems right back to colonialism when we were the farm of the empire,” Rose says. “And that privilege has been maintained right to this date.
“It’s got this narrative around it, that it’s benign, that we're the best at it in the world, that we're carbon neutral, and that it's untouchable.”
There is no doubt our farmers make a huge contribution to our export earnings, and have come up with some innovative ways of doing business over the years. To a large extent, this is due to the fact that for the past 30 years the sector has had to stand on its own two feet the way many countries, including our traditional export rivals, haven’t had to – without subsidies.
But Christine Rose says the sector’s push-backs have cost us 20 years of progress in terms of reducing emissions.
At the same time as there have been few breakthroughs in terms of technology fixes for cow burps, there have been no decisions on how to get farmers to stump up for the emissions they produce.
On the latest podcast you’ll hear Newsroom’s climate change reporter, Marc Daalder, explain why there has been a significant rise in nitrous oxide emissions since 1990, and how the increase in the number of dairy farms saw tens of thousands of hectares of forest disappear - a double negative whammy for the environment.
When New Zealand finally got an Emissions Trading Scheme in 2008, agriculture was given an extra five years to get ready. It was meant to come in 2013. Then that date was pushed back to 2015, then 2020.
Most recently there was a Government proposal for a sweetened deal to bring farmers into the ETS really slowly - over 100 years.
In June, He Waka Eke Noa, a primary sector group representing of 13 of the biggest agriculture-related organisations came out with its alternative climate change plan.
It involves some levies, to be offset by the sequestration on farms from native bush and other vegetation that isn’t eligible to be included in the ETS. And those levies are charged at only about 5 percent of the price non-agricultural emitters might have to pay. Farmers would also get rebates for any emission-reducing technologies they introduced.
Daalder believes there will be heated debate over this proposal.
“It's quite generous to farmers in that it's focused more on paying them to do good things, than forcing them to pay a price for emissions… the general theory of any emissions price is that it costs money to pollute, and therefore you are incentivised to stop polluting,” he says.
The other problem with the He Waka Eke Noa proposal is it relies heavily on new technologies - things like methane inhibiting vaccines, and special feed additives - to get cows burping less. But those technologies haven't been invented yet - or at least they are at a very early stage.
Best practice dairy
The fact there are big problems to solve doesn’t mean nothing is happening. On the podcast, Nikki Mandow travels to Whakatane to meet Fraser McGougan, a fourth generation farmer with 430 dairy cows.
Willowvale Farm is an example of best practice environmental dairy farming in New Zealand and McGougan is one of a dozen or so Dairy NZ climate change ambassadors. He helped put together the He Waka Eke Noa farming emissions proposal and he’s showcasing what can be done by dairy farmers if they think about sustainability as an integral part of their farming practice.
That means low stock numbers per hectare, to match what the land can hold in terms of pasture, and supplementing grass with crops grown on the farm.
“We're not trying to import feeds, we're not trying to import too many nutrients,” McGougan says. “We're trying to be at a sustainable level.” That means no palm kernel for feed; and no adding artificial nutrients to the soil. Instead, effluent is recycled.
His epiphany in terms of sustainable, regenerative farming came from watching the impact climate change was having on his own property. His family had been seeing higher temperatures, more dry weather and, on the other side, more extreme flooding. The Whakatane River borders the farm.
McGougan says it’s not legislation that will force change – it will be the environment.
Matt Cowie, a director in the Climate Change and Sustainability Services team at consultancy company EY New Zealand, says it’s critical to get farmers on board if we’re going to have a chance of getting to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
But finding something that works will not be easy.
“At the moment, one of the challenges for agriculture is the technology to be able to do that doesn't really exist at scale, like it does in other sectors. If I think about the emissions that I have in my home, then there's lots of options I can I can choose. I can buy an EV, I can switch to heat pumps, I can remove the gas heating, lots and lots of options.
“But those options are more limited at the moment for agriculture.”
Net Zero: The Road to 2050 is a six-part Newsroom podcast series, made in collaboration with EY. Business editor Nikki Mandow looks at some of the most interesting, critical and sometimes confusing ways in which New Zealand is tackling climate change. We’ll release a new episode every fortnight, demystifying complex issues involved in the push to get Aotearoa to net zero emissions by 2050.
PREVIOUS EPISODES:
► Green hydrogen: How Team NZ tech is helping us power ahead
► Zombie forests, carbon sinks and the ETS
