DAIRY OR BEEF-GREENHOUSE GASES

keep going

Surprised this hasnt come up lately due to greenhouse gases negotiations but if there has to be a trade off,what is the best economically for the country.are we so sure that dairy cows will deliver more for the country(not individual farmers)than suckers.

_Brian

I'd wonder down the line will either really play a role.
With the EU position on signing trade agreements with anyone with a crayon in their hand it's more and more likely that the EU will be flooded with cheap raw material foods that leave anything produced here seem expensive.

Beef and meats are likely the first to be replaced so I'd say dairy is likely to outlast the beef industry.

freedominacup

keep going wrote: »

Surprised this hasnt come up lately due to greenhouse gases negotiations but if there has to be a trade off,what is the best economically for the country.are we so sure that dairy cows will deliver more for the country(not individual farmers)than suckers.

The real sickener on this is that no account is taken of the amount of CO2 absorbed by the grass our stock are grazing. i.e. CO2 produced by Michael O'Learys cattle is regarded as no different to CO2 produced by his planes. And at the same time veg production is regarded as completely benign despite the huge quantities of artificial fert used, endless amounts of fungicides, herbicides and pesticides used not to mention the amount of CO2 released every time land is ploughed which can be 2-3 times per year in intensive veg production. Farm organisations really dropped the ball on this but hard to blame them when farmers in this country can't see the word environmental without adding the word scheme to it and trying to figure out if there's any cash to be got.

barnaman

freedominacup wrote: »

The real sickener on this is that no account is taken of the amount of CO2 absorbed by the grass our stock are grazing. i.e. CO2 produced by Michael O'Learys cattle is regarded as no different to CO2 produced by his planes. And at the same time veg production is regarded as completely benign despite the huge quantities of artificial fert used, endless amounts of fungicides, herbicides and pesticides used not to mention the amount of CO2 released every time land is ploughed which can be 2-3 times per year in intensive veg production. Farm organisations really dropped the ball on this but hard to blame them when farmers in this country can't see the word environmental without adding the word scheme to it and trying to figure out if there's any cash to be got.

No I believe its all taken into account just not done properly here yet. See http://www.coolfarmtool.org/Home similar free ones in US. US ones look at soil type etc. CO2 is CO2 no matter what produces it. All this will be the next big change in Ag. I have a very envirinmental farm lots of habitats ie 200 yeear olds woods etc yet none any use for Glas or other schemes and certain action mandatory for me make scheme impractical.

freedominacup

barnaman wrote: »

No I believe its all taken into account just not done properly here yet. See http://www.coolfarmtool.org/Home similar free ones in US. US ones look at soil type etc. CO2 is CO2 no matter what produces it. All this will be the next big change in Ag. I have a very envirinmental farm lots of habitats ie 200 yeear olds woods etc yet none any use for Glas or other schemes and certain action mandatory for me make scheme impractical.

CO2 is CO2 no doubt about that but the airline business for example does not have CO2 sequestration taking place as an intrinsic part of its production process. Dairy farming does and despite the link you posted which is to a calculator for the amount of CO2 sequestered by different farm production systems to the best of my knowledge farming and farmers are not credited with this sequestration certainly in Europe. Any sequestration like this that is credited in this country just goes to the national bottom line. A tonne of CO2 generated by your cattle exhaling or MOLs jets taking off is the same problem for both businesses to account for.

Suckler

freedominacup wrote: »

A tonne of CO2 generated by your cattle exhaling....

I think the issue with farm animals is the gas coming out the other end as well i.e production of methane. "These microbes produce methane as a by-product of their metabolism and this is then released by the animal as burping and flatulence"

merryberry

freedominacup wrote: »

CO2 is CO2 no doubt about that but the airline business for example does not have CO2 sequestration taking place as an intrinsic part of its production process. Dairy farming does and despite the link you posted which is to a calculator for the amount of CO2 sequestered by different farm production systems to the best of my knowledge farming and farmers are not credited with this sequestration certainly in Europe. Any sequestration like this that is credited in this country just goes to the national bottom line. A tonne of CO2 generated by your cattle exhaling or MOLs jets taking off is the same problem for both businesses to account for.

+1

Unlike forestry, sequestration in grass and arable is not accounted....yet. Potential exists, more so in arable than grassland, as soil C is lower because ploughing increases minerailisation of C to the atmosphere. Methods like mintill, cover crops and incorporation of residues and organic manures build up soil C over time. We can potentially get credit for this.

Grassland on the other hand has an existing high background of soil C because of reduced disturbance. Where the background C is high it can be difficult to add to. Also overtime they will become saturated. So if we're not improving soil C in grassland, and because it is already high, we can't get credit or get very little credit for it. We can protect the soil C stocks in grassland with appropriate stocking rates, on off grazing and pH correction.

Accounting is the problem....no universal agreement on this complex matter.

yosemitesam1

I don't think there's anyone who knows how carbon is sequestered in the ground, I wonder have Irish soils any potential to put down massive amounts of carbon like the soils out in eastern Europe and north America

barnaman

I think that Cool Farm works in the UK

This is interesting as whilst research for forestry would have wider application.

https://www.ucd.ie/cforrep/documents/7.pdf

Personally I wonder if people are overegging the capacity of grassland to absorb CO2 etc. The ability of saturated peaty gleys to absorb much gases or C I wonder. Ultimately may effect land use. Lets say they say poor wet land can absorb X amount of gas and thus can support this stocking rate whilst rich mineral soil can support 10X will push poorer land towards forestry and Gov not mind as its in faovour of forestry and can say forestry most appropriate land use.

BY way for Glas is ther not a requirement to do a carbon footprint for your farm?.

merryberry

barnaman wrote: »

BY way for Glas is ther not a requirement to do a carbon footprint for your farm?.

Not for glas but carbon navigator is part of bdgp and knowledge transfer programme

djmc

To answer the op I think there will be room for both.
Dairy would win hands down as far as income into the country per acre of ground or kg of grass the Kerry group and glanba have too much investment in it feeding the world to let it slip.
The beef animals will still have a place in ground not suitable for dairy or forestry.
I wonder if the breeding might change though as the bb or CH lim are not really suitable for marginal type ground either.

fits

Co2 sequestration in grass is accounted for. The problem is that grass goes into cattle as carbon and comes back out as methane which is 24 times more potent a greenhoyse gas.

Said grass also has a load of fertiliser thrown on it which is also associated with high emissions.

kowtow

fits wrote: »

Co2 sequestration in grass is accounted for. The problem is that grass goes into cattle as carbon and comes back out as methane which is 24 times more potent a greenhoyse gas.

Said grass also has a load of fertiliser thrown on it which is also associated with high emissions.

Taken together does that not mean that the most environmentally friendly system for Ireland is not the current system, but would actually be indoor, zero grazed, high yielding grass fed cows with an absolute minimum of maize and a digester to process manure?

Methane turned into power, higher yield per animal fart, digestate (sans methane) spread on fields to improve organic matter and therefore maximum carbon sequestration?

Obviously the tractor & zero grazer would have to run on eco fuel!

barnaman

kowtow that is a spot on assessment the problem is that Ireland's farm are too fragmented/small for that to work. If you had a central system/collective farming that is how to make it work! Starting do that a bit over in England this few years some huge diary lads over there heading that way.

kowtow

barnaman wrote: »

kowtow that is a spot on assessment the problem is that Ireland's farm are too fragmented/small for that to work. If you had a central system/collective farming that is how to make it work! Starting do that a bit over in England this few years some huge diary lads over there heading that way.

I would have thought it was quite well suited to fragmentation... gets rid of the tyranny of the grazing platform (at least while expanding)..

it takes me 5 minutes to get to the creamery and I pass 5 dairy farms on the way, which in my book makes the creamery a good site for a communal digester.

Or we could stop trying to line the pockets of corporates and grant jockeys and start building much smaller digesters... interestingly there are EU funded projects which put 100 dollar digesters on farms all over India for the use of one or two cows... but I doubt they'd be too keen on the poor debt-laden European farmer installing anything that didn't cost the fat part of a million, with grants and regulations to match.

yosemitesam1

I think something like 80-90% of methane is breathed out so sticking in digesters might not make any difference

kowtow

yosemitesam1 wrote:

I think something like 80-90% of methane is breathed out so sticking in digesters might not make any difference

I wondered if that might be the case..

patsy_mccabe

As things stand, greenhouse gases are assessed on a production per country basis. No account is taken about the levels of exports from that country. Take our Beef situation here. We export 90% of the beef we produce, so in effect our consumption of beef only accounts for 10% of those gases we are credited with producing. It doesn't make sense to stop Beef production in one country and move that to another country where even more greenhouse gases would be produced.
It's as much a PR exercise as anything else. Put on the positive spin and things can look a lot different.

fits

patsy_mccabe wrote: »

As things stand, greenhouse gases are assessed on a production per country basis. No account is taken about the levels of exports from that country. Take our Beef situation here. We export 90% of the beef we produce, so in effect our consumption of beef only accounts for 10% of those gases we are credited with producing. It doesn't make sense to stop Beef production in one country and move that to another country where even more greenhouse gases would be produced.
I

Agree with this, but not the PR bit. It is factually true to say that it is preferable to produce beef at a low rate of emissions per kilo. Irelands beef is relatively low in emissions (I am not familiar with most recent studies) and this can be optimised further. IT would be stupid to stop producing here and knock down forests in brazil to facilitate an increase in production there (wrecking the soil as well as the forests). A global perspective is always needed.

fits

At the same time it would also help if we all ate less meat. We dont need it three times a day! Im with Arnie on this,.

148multi

A kilo of beef from the suckler herd has twice the carbon footprint as a kilo of beef from the dairy herd

blue5000

There's a few misconceptions about carbon sequestration,

If forestry is planted on peaty soil it takes about 15 years for the forest to sequester carbon to the same level of carbon in the peat before it was planted. This is because of soil disturbance (draining, mounding, lower water tables) and oxidising the carbon when the trees are planted.

Biomass crops would be similar, but probably wouldn't take 15 years to equal what the soil had before planting.

Intensive grassland farming actually sequesters more carbon than less intensive farming. This is because of higher nitrogen levels in the soil. Nitrogen increases microbial activity in the soil. It's the microbes that break down the organic matter to convert it to a more stable form in the soil. But making artificial N fertiliser uses energy (carbon) so clover swards are probably better for sequestering carbon than intensively farmed soils. AFAIK nobody has done any research comparing intensive grassland with clover for soil sequestration of carbon. This could be important for beef farmers in Ireland.

Maize is actually a good crop for soil sequestration, first a lot of slurry (OM) is usually ploughed in to grow it, secondly it has deep roots which stay in the soil and break down adding OM deep down in the soil. However plastic and compaction are not good for soil.

Methane is the big issue for cattle, it is something like 24x worse for the atmosphere than carbon. Cattle belch it out. There needs to be more research to make the rumen more efficient, yosemitesam1 is on the ball.

Timmaay

Two things that I think will help carbon efficiency of grass based dairy and beef down the line, 1st one will be a lower protein grass, this is being worked in in NZ at the minute. Grass has excess protien which is excreted in the form of urea from cattle at the minute. This new lower protien grass should also grow more tons than existing grass. The 2nd thing is cattle genetics, I can see CO2 efficency being built into likes of EBI. As things stand for dairying the xbred JE probably has the upper hand here already, with her knocking out something around 10% more solids per unit bodyweight. But as someone just mentioned, zero avoiding the fact that methane is many times more damaging that CO2 to the environment, solutions like I suggested above are unlikely to go far enough, the main angle would be to get the carbon footprint lower than other sources of beef and dairying.

Capercaillie

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

I think something like 80-90% of methane is breathed out so sticking in digesters might not make any difference

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas the CO2. Burning methane produces CO2 and water, which are less harmful.

merryberry

Capercaillie wrote: »

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas the CO2. Burning methane produces CO2 and water, which are less harmful.

Wouldn't agree that CO2 is less harmful. As potent a gas as methane is it is still a relatively short lived gas about 12 to 14 years. On the other hand CO2 persists for about a 1000 years.

barnaman

The agriculture sector accounted for 32.6% of Ireland's total national emissions in 2013 and this is amongst the highest of any country in the developed world.

from

http://www.agriculture.gov.ie/ruralenvironment/climatechangebioenergybiodiversity/agricultureclimatechange/Interestin tax on beef looking being considered in the 6 counties . Beef worse polluter than dairy

http://www.afbini.gov.uk/ghg_policy_impacts_on_agri-food_.pdf