Dairy and Carbon Emissions – What Does it all Mean?

Greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, carbon credits, mitigation strategies, emission reduction targets - these are terms that are bandied about regularly in relation to agriculture and dairying. What do they all mean and how do they impact you at a farm level?

This month, my colleague Zita Ritchie interviews Blake Cheer a Dairy Development Officer with NSW DPI and Aaron Simmons, a senior research scientist also with the DPI. Blake has a background in Climate & Environmental Management which was the focus of his work in a previous role in New Zealand, where a GHG emissions partnership for primary producers has been introduced.

Aaron’s role sees him work on activity focussed around climate change mitigation in agricultural systems and he also dabbles in the policy and market issues around efforts to reduce GHG emissions.

Useful resources related to this podcast:

Australian Dairy Carbon Calculator 

DairyBase

The On Farm Carbon Advice Project - For further information please contact the NSW DPI Team via their email address which is carbon@dpi.nsw.gov.au 

Dairy Australia online course on Climate Change:  Course: Climate Change (dairyaustralia.com.au)

This podcast is an initiative of the NSW DPI Dairy Business Advisory Unit

It is brought to you in partnership the Hunter Local Land Services

Please share this podcast with your fellow farmers and colleagues and feel free to contact us with suggestions or comments via this email address thebusinessofdairy@gmail.com

Further NSW DPI Dairy channels to follow and subscribe to include;

NSW DPI Dairy Facebook page

DPI Intensive Livestock Twitter feed

NSW DPI Dairy Newsletter

Transcript here

Produced by Video Lift

The information discussed in this podcast are for informative and educational purposes only and do not constitute advice. 

Transcript

The Business of Dairy 

Episode #26 Transcript – “Dairy and Carbon Emissions – What Does it all Mean?”

Sheena Carter: Welcome to the Business of Dairy Podcast, I'm Sheena Carter, Development Officer with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Dairy Team. Greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, carbon credits, mitigation strategies, emission reduction targets. These are terms that are bandied about regularly in relation to agriculture and dairying. What do they all mean and how do they impact you at a farm level? This month my colleague Zita Ritchie interviews Blake Cheer, a Dairy Development Officer with New South Wales DPI, and Aaron Simmons, a senior research scientist, also with the DPI. Blake has a background in climate and environmental management, which was the focus of his work in a previous role in New Zealand, where a greenhouse gas emissions partnership for primary producers has been introduced. Aaron's role sees him work on activity focused around climate change mitigation in agricultural systems, and he also dabbles in the policy and market issues around efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Zita Ritchie: Welcome to the podcast, Blake and Aaron, thanks for joining us today. So I know that this is quite topical at the moment – talking around carbon emissions and the relevance for dairy and the dairy sector. I guess just to start with, it'd be great to get a bit of background about what have been some of the key drivers about reducing our carbon footprint, and then what's happening in other places around the world, and what we're likely to see short, medium term, when we're talking about carbon emissions for agriculture and the dairy sector, more specifically. So I don't know, Aaron, do you want to maybe start with some of the context around that more broadly? That'd be great. 

Aaron Simmons: Well, I guess at a global level, there's a number of initiatives that have been set up around reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change. Probably the key one is the Paris Agreement, which put an upper limit on global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. So I think we're already at about one degree from memory – I can't remember precisely, but that was something that was put in place and replaced the Kyoto Protocol, which people have probably heard about as well. So we've now moved on to the Paris Agreement. In addition to that, there are plenty of net zero targets. And so net zero means that the emissions associated with human activities are offset by carbon sequestration from the atmosphere and so you end up with essentially zero – so you’re then not having an impact on climate change. And when you look around the globe, there're actually numerous countries that have set net zero targets in different timeframes – some have by 2050, others by 2060. 

And from memory, it covers about 90% of the global population. So those net zero targets are actually, you know, they're pretty common. And then there was the Global Methane Pledge that was recently made, or relatively recently made, and that was to reduce global methane emissions by 30% by 2030. And Australia is a signatory to the Global Methane Pledge. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, right. So there's lots of different agreements out there by the sounds of it. And then Blake, from your perspective, supply chain, you know, Aaron's talked about the political agenda and some of the targets we're setting there, what are you seeing through the supply chain as well? 

Blake Cheer: Yeah thanks, Zita. Yeah, absolutely, as Aaron touched on, we've had some global pledges, but also coming down to a company level, we've seen the likes of some big global companies such as Nestlé, create those net zero emission targets by 2050, also, sort of, targets by 2025 and 2030 to have a reduction on their overall emissions within the dairy companies, the likes of Fonterra, they're hoping to reduce their emissions by 30% by 2030 and also have net zero carbon emissions by 2050 across their entire supply chain. And even if we look across the ditch in New Zealand, the government over there, it's just introduced a Primary Sector Climate Action Partnership called, He Waka Eke Noa, basically they're trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector and build the sector resilience towards climate change. So the outcome of that is that by 2025, farmers will have to have a written plan in place to measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions. And the Government also plans to introduce a farm level levy on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand from 2025 onwards, which is currently under development. And then locally here we've also got the Australian Dairy Industry Sustainability Framework. So yeah, the goal there is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 30% by 2030 and that's both on farm and in the manufacturing sectors of dairy. 

Zita Ritchie: We're seeing a lot of different changes and initiatives through dairy processes and in the dairy industry alike, for sure. And the 30% reduction there, Blake, that you mentioned in emissions intensity, that's for the Australian dairy industry, is that right? 

Blake Cheer: Correct, yeah. So that's both, when we look at the industry, we're looking at both the manufacturing side of dairy and as well as on farm. 

Aaron Simmons: I think it's worthwhile also recognising, Zita, that even though we've got these things set up at a global level, you know, emissions reductions targets and everything else, a lot of it's actually driven by the consumer. You know, consumers are wanting and preferencing low greenhouse gas emissions or even just low environmental impact foods. So really it's not necessarily pandering to, you know, government or international bodies, it's actually consumers responding to concerns around the environmental impacts of their choices and, you know, using their wallets to make decisions. So, you know, making sure that we've got social license as an industry to continue to operate is critical. And if the consumers want this so that we've got our social licence, then, you know, that's kind of something that needs to be done. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of three pronged, isn't it really? It's kind of like the global agenda that we’re seeing, and then through supply chain processes and then from the consumer perspective as well, kind of brings it all together, doesn't it? Yeah. And that gives really good context about why we're, you know, working more in this space with the Australian dairy farm industry to try and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and environmental footprint to meet these demands. So I guess that brings us to the next thing of, alright, well, we're speaking about carbon emissions. I think bringing it back to, I guess, the basics to start with, Aaron, it’d be great to just set the scene of, you know, well, we've got different types of greenhouse gas emissions, obviously carbon dioxide being the main one, but we know that agriculture is quite unique, that it's got different sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Would you be able to just touch on what are the three main greenhouse gas emissions we're likely to find on a dairy farm? And maybe what are some of the key sources of these and what are the difference between these gases, really? 

Aaron Simmons: The three that people would be most familiar, or most concerned about, would be carbon dioxide, which you just mentioned, Zita, nitrous oxide and methane. So I won’t go into the sources of these in great detail, I’ll let Blake do that, but carbon dioxide, when we look at it, it generally doesn't get emitted on farm, it's more around electricity production, you know, milking and particularly cooling milk, uses a lot of electricity, or a relatively high amount of electricity, and so when that's generated by burning coal or burning gas, that emits CO2. So that's probably the greatest source for a dairy farm, even though it doesn't occur on farm. 

Nitrous oxide is actually quite a potent greenhouse gas. So when you use this metric called global warming potential, which is really just a measurement of the impact that a particular gas has relevant to carbon dioxide, you're looking at about 280 times the impact of carbon dioxide. So emitting one kilogram of nitrous oxide is the equivalent of emitting 280kg of carbon dioxide. So it's really quite potent. 

And the other one is methane. And so methane is probably the biggest concern, I suppose, well not the biggest concern, I'd say it may be in the end, where we can see some of our greatest emissions reductions occur. But yeah, I'll let Blake talk about the sources of them and if there's something that I can add, I guess more around the technical aspects of it so people understand how those emissions occur, then I'll add some stuff there. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, that's great. Over to you, Blake. 

Blake Cheer: Thanks, Zita. So if we look at the main contributors of greenhouse gas emissions on a typical Australian dairy farm, 67% of emissions are coming through methane, 57% of those are enteric methane, and 10% of that is waste methane.

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, that's right. So yeah, that's really great, Blake. So you've really just identified the three main sources, the biggest source being methane, which is the enteric side, which is the belching mostly through digestion from the cows themselves, with a smaller proportion from waste methane and then nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide. So there's a lot of talk out there around soils, so how do they fit into the emissions picture? Soil carbon and sequestration, maybe, Aaron, would you like to just chat about what does sequestration actually mean and how do soils fit into the overall emissions picture? 

Aaron Simmons: Well, there's a couple of ways that soils fit into the overall emissions picture. One is that they're a source of emissions, but then they can, you know, as you just mentioned, you can sequester carbon and reduce your emissions in soil. So soils being a source of emissions, essentially when you put on your nitrogenous fertilisers, so you'll put urea on your winter pastures, kind of thing, if you're on the north coast, what happens is that you have free nitrates or nitrogen available in the soil and then when the soils get very wet, so if you have a rainfall event and you end up with very wet soils, you actually lose a lot of your nitrogen through a process called denitrification and that emits nitrous oxide. You know, you can have some quite high losses of nitrogen through the denitrification process. The other way, and it's actually an indirect way but you do get it in your greenhouse gas accounts, is through indirect emissions. And so if you apply urea, I mean most farmers would be well aware of this, you know, if you apply urea at the wrong time, it can sit there and it just releases ammonia into the atmosphere and you're losing the nitrogen and the fertiliser to the atmosphere. But that is actually responsible for emissions later on because it gets captured in the rain, redeposited and then you get denitrification associated with that. So when you're looking at what happens with nitrogen, it isn't just what happens now, it actually tries to follow that process through a bit because there's ongoing emissions associated with the use of nitrogenous fertilisers – urea, calcium, ammonium nitrate, anything that's got N in it, basically. And so that's where soils become a source of greenhouse gas emissions through the use of fertilisers. 

Then you can actually reduce your emissions through carbon sequestration. So essentially with carbon sequestration, you're sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere through plant growth and then plants lock that up in soil organic matter. So a plant grows and then parts of the plant die and that stays in the soil as soil organic matter, and, you know, about 50% of that soil organic matter is carbon, and so you're sequestering carbon. So there's been a lot of interest in soil carbon and particularly, you know, generating income by sequestering soil carbon, but people need to be cautious with it. So that process, as I spoke about with sequestering carbon through soil organic matter, what happens is that bugs in the soil use that soil organic matter, or the carbon in it, as energy and it gets respired back to the atmosphere – so it gets cycled. So you're not just storing soil carbon – that's the wrong way to think about it – you're constantly cycling carbon through the soil. And if you want to have an increase in soil carbon, you need to put more carbon into your soil than gets taken back out and respired by the bugs back into the atmosphere. And so really you're just putting more carbon into the soil than is being released from the soil, and that's how you get soil carbon sequestration. So when you look at what drives that, a lot of the time it's climate, it's not actually management. And if you particularly look at dairy farms and the guys that are running very efficient systems, you know, they're high input, they know what's taken out in their milk – so replacing the nutrients that are taken out with their milk with fertilisers and things like that – they're probably going to have a really high soil organic carbon already. So where you've already got a high soil organic carbon, because you can't just keep adding carbon to your soil through plant growth, it maxes out at a point, so a lot of farmers on their dairy country, on their milking country, they're probably already a really high carbon value, so they don't actually have potential to increase their carbon there. So really, you know, when we think about soil carbon – you know, I do a lot of soil carbon research – so when we think about soil carbon, it's not just that you're storing it there and it’s a permanent store, you know, it can be lost. We've had sites where we saw really good increases over a five year period and then we went back there five years later and it was all gone again. The farmers hadn't done anything different. It was just that the climate had changed – it wasn't climate change – you know, just seasonal conditions meant that the microbes had changed and they had actually chewed through that organic matter and respired the carbon back to the atmosphere. So it's very risky, you know, to actually go out there and try and sequester carbon and trade it, because in the end it's going to be driven by seasonal conditions more than management. So I think it's just good for people to be aware of that. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, absolutely. So while building soil organic carbon is critical to have good soil health, pasture growth, it's just to tread with caution really when we're talking about it. 

Aaron Simmons: Yeah, everybody wants to have as high carbon as they can because the agronomic benefits of it are fantastic, but you just want to be careful what you do with it once you've got it there because you can lose it. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, that's right. So we could talk about soil carbon all day, but I guess in terms of the emissions and carbon story for a dairy farm, you spoke about carbon footprint, and then when we're thinking about, okay, well, we know our sources – the main greenhouse gas emissions on a dairy farm, what is the average carbon footprint, or what we often call it is emissions intensity, like, per unit of product or per kilogram of milk solids for a dairy farm, like what is that? And we also talk about becoming carbon neutral or like, you know, that kind of thing. So I'm just wondering to put it in perspective, what are we trying to achieve and what's realistic to achieve? I was wondering if both of you might have some comments around that. I don't know, Blake or Aaron, would you want to go first? 

Aaron Simmons: Oh, I'll offer up something first with the emissions intensity of milk: it's going to be about 0.9 to 1.1 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of fat protein corrected milk. You know, there's been enough studies done out there – I've done some stuff recently and that's the figure that you're looking at to produce a litre of milk. 

Zita Ritchie: Yep, okay. So Aaron, carbon dioxide equivalents? Would you just mind explaining what that means? 

Aaron Simmons: Yeah thanks, Zita. Good point because it isn't actually difficult, but it's important to clarify it. So when I spoke about the different greenhouse gas emissions we have in dairy systems and I said they all had different potencies, so, you know, nitrous oxide was 280 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that kind of thing, by doing those adjustments, so for every kilogram of nitrous oxide that's emitted, it's assumed to be equivalent to 280kg of carbon dioxide, we can we convert all gases to carbon dioxide equivalents. And so that's another mechanism that allows us to actually do comparisons across different enterprises or different products, that kind of thing, because one dairy may have more nitrous oxide emissions, whereas a beef production, for example, may have less nitrous oxide emissions, but we've all got to put them on that same level playing field, and that's carbon dioxide equivalent. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, that's right. So when you see the terminology CO2e, that's what it means – carbon dioxide equivalent. And I know that there's a target, I mean, Blake, I know earlier you mentioned about the Australian dairy industry targets in terms of emissions intensity and reducing that emissions intensity per kilogram of fat and protein corrected milk, what's the target there for 2030 for the dairy industry in terms of reducing that? 

Blake Cheer: Yeah, so the target there is to reduce by 30% – so, total intensity. So, I suppose just getting back to when we talk about emissions intensity, as Aaron mentioned, we're measuring against a unit of output. So, in the case of dairy, that's KG of CO2 equivalent of fat and protein corrected milk. So we're trying to reduce our intensity to be able to reduce that same litre or KG of milk solids at 30% less intensity. The other way that we measure emissions is through our total emissions. So, that's by doing a calculation of all the sum of emissions on our dairy farm. What we can do from there is break that down on a per kilo or per hectare basis. So yeah, it's really important that we do differentiate between the two and try and get an understanding of what the two different calculations are trying to calculate. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, no, that's really good. Aaron, did you have anything else to add there? 

Aaron Simmons: Yeah, no, I was just going to say that just because, and it's probably counterintuitive to people that haven't really thought about it a lot, there's ways that you can actually reduce your emissions intensity but have no impact on your total emissions, or increase your total emissions, but there's actually other ways that you can reduce your emissions intensity by implementing things, but then you increase your total emissions. So if you do something that improves your emissions intensity through efficiency, for example, but that means that you can carry more cows, then you might actually increase your total emissions. I think when you look at it from a consumer perspective and a market access perspective, which I'd argue is probably the most important perspective, people are looking for lower emissions intensity. When there's a carbon footprint label, that's what they're talking about, emissions intensity. You know, they aren't labelling and saying, this milk has come from a carbon neutral farm. There are some specific brands, you know, Coles have got their carbon neutral beef and… oh, there’s actually a couple of carbon neutral beef brands out there, but really when we look at what's driving consumers, it's actually emissions intensity. That's where people should be focused on. What we do want to see is things that reduce emissions intensity also improve efficiency, so you do get, you know, that increase in total emissions as well. You know, people need to understand that sometimes the two don't align. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, yeah, I understand. And it's a bit tricky, isn't it, when you're trying to wrap your head around this stuff, I mean, if we're talking about it from an emissions intensity perspective, we want to lower our emissions footprint, or carbon footprint, for our product – litre of milk or whatever it is. What are some of the key areas that we can focus on? And I guess, there's probably things that we can do now and maybe things that are emerging – there's a lot of emerging research in this space. I mean, Blake, before, you mentioned the sources of emissions and then you mentioned six key areas. Would you be able to just touch on what those are and what, maybe, something that farmers can think of short term? Like, what can we do now to reduce our emissions intensity? ­­ 

Blake Cheer: Yeah, absolutely. So I think with emissions, there's also a lot of co-benefits around trying to improve efficiency on farm, and I know farmers have been trying to do this for many, many years – is improving efficiency. But basically if we look at some things like a bit of feed conversion efficiency. So how can we better utilise our feed on farm and have less wastage? Is there some things we can do with our animal genetics about getting better feed conversion efficiency? Some other on-farm management practices could be through the use of our nitrogen fertiliser, making sure that when we are applying that we're looking at the four R’s, which are the right source at the right rate at the right place at the right time. So making sure that we don't get any leachate or volatilisation wastages through there. 

Zita Ritchie: It's kind of those short term early wins, isn't it, really? So it's looking at those efficiency gains that we can make on farm – there might be other avenues that farmers haven't thought about – so looking at your energy efficiency, possibility of including renewables, I guess, tackling those low hanging win-win options to start with. And then I think both you and Blake have mentioned, well, the biggest source of emissions on a dairy farm is methane, so what is some of the emerging research that we're seeing in this area, where we can see probably the biggest gains? Where's that up to from a practical perspective? 

Aaron Simmons: Well, we're past the research point with a product called 3 NOP or Bovaer, you know, that's commercially available – 1.5 cents per litre of milk produced is the number that I've been given. So not just this, but things need to be economically viable for farmers to implement them, and I think that's the hurdle at this stage. So yeah, we've got 3 NOP to reduce enteric methane and I can't remember off the top of my head right now what those emissions reductions were, but they were, they were significant, and then there's work being done around the seaweed, Asparagopsis. There is another one that's currently available – is using fats and oils, and feeding animals fats and oils, which I didn't realise up until, I don't know, 12-18 months ago when I was talking to the farmer, how widespread that actually is to do that. So people that aren't doing that could see reductions around increasing the fat and oil content to the maximum that you can. Another one that's available is that using things called nitrification inhibitors on fertilisers. So at the moment, you know, again it comes down to economics – it's 100 bucks a tonne – and you can get urea that has got a nitrification inhibitor on it, Green Urea, and that will reduce your emissions associated with fertiliser use. So I think people also need to look at it very holistically in that, yes, 100 bucks a tonne, particularly with urea prices the way they've been, is a fair slug on top of your fertiliser bill, but it may actually reduce your nitrogen needs because your nitrogen use efficiency improves. You know, there's swings and roundabouts in this, I guess. Something Blake mentioned earlier that you can do now is cover your effluent pond and flare that methane. you know, that'll reduce the emissions associated with manure and effluent on the farm. Critically you can actually use the heat that's generated from that, or the gas – the methane, you can use that to drive a motor and generate electricity, or you can use it for heat, which can then be used for cooling or it can be used for hot water, you know, yeah, dairy has got a number of advantages that I think more extensive livestock production systems don't have. You know, the cows are fed regularly, so you're more suitable to feed them supplements to reduce your methane, it's energy intensive – you're generating an energy source right then and there. Actually, that reminds me of another one that's just… well, it will become available, they’re currently selling it in Europe, is a particular nitrogen fertiliser, and if you add that to your effluent system, I think it's like a kilogram of it per cubic meter, drops the methane in your effluent system to about zero, which you can then put that nitrogen fertiliser back on your paddocks with your effluent anyway. So that's not available in Australia yet – they haven't actually given us a timeframe on when they're going to bring that in, and I doubt it's, you know, even if it is a kilo per cubic meter, I doubt that's going to be priced at the same price as urea, it'll be sold as a premium. So there are those things that people can do now, but there are things that will either, come onto the market, or the things that are on the market at the moment will have to become more cost effective as, you know, as uptake increases and production increases – it’s the old supply and demand thing, you know, as supply increases hopefully the price will come down a little bit when we're trying to meet needs. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, so it's just basically being aware of what those options might be down the track, whether they're not financially, you know, feasible to implement at the moment or commercially, but it's just seeing what's coming down, yeah, medium, long term. But yeah, I think for now it's kind of like, well what can we do now currently? And yeah, as Blake mentioned, there's a lot of best practice things that are actually improving efficiency whilst reducing emissions. 

Aaron Simmons: Yep, I guess the thing is that, and I'm not by any means saying that farmers shouldn't go out there and actually take them on, but there's no way when you're doing your emissions calculations for your farm that you can say, well guess what, I use my urea using the four R's, so therefore my emissions are lower. So there's also, not necessarily research, but frameworks have to be developed so that these kind of things can actually be integrated to reduce the emissions associated with production. And that's ongoing, the Federal Government is actually handling a lot of that stuff because they're the ones that report our emissions back up into international frameworks, so they need to do that so our national emissions go down. There's benefits to producers doing things anyway that makes things more efficient or they're getting a better, you know, they're recovering more nitrogen, they're having better nitrogen use efficiencies. But at this stage it won't actually show up in lower emissions intensity. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, I see. I mean, that also just leads to the next question of, well, if I'm a farmer listening to this today and I want to find out more information for my farm, like, what are my net farm emissions, what is my emissions intensity, where can I go to explore that, and what tools are currently out there for dairy farmers to do that? I mean, Blake or Aaron, could either of you signpost to some tools? 

Blake Cheer: Thanks, Zita. So we've got the Australian Dairy Carbon Calculator, so that's available on website. Also, when we do our DairyBase analysis – so some farmers already do this already to get an indication of their financial and physical KPIs on farm – that will also give us a greenhouse gas, or emissions calculation, completed in the background. 

Aaron Simmons: And that's probably one of the things that a farmer can do now is actually understand what their emissions profile is. Because even though I just said, you know, the emissions intensity of milk production is going to be around 0.9 to 1.1 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent, that mix will vary greatly on where they're getting their energy from, how much nitrogen they're using, all these different bits and pieces. So if they do their, you know, whole farm emissions now and they can see where their emissions come from, it actually starts that thinking cycle of, well, where can I reduce emissions and how can I reduce emissions? 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, that's right, and you can play around with those tools to look at, well, if I implement this, how does that impact your overall emissions and track that over time, potentially, as well. The two tools that Blake mentioned, I'll put in the show notes with the podcast, so if any farmers are interested they can click on those links to find out more information. Aaron, in terms of data requirements for something like the Australian Dairy Carbon Calculator, what are some of the key bits of information that a farmer would need to enter to put that data in? 

Aaron Simmons: Um, actually, no, I'm going to say that I haven't looked at the new ADCC, but I do know how they go through and calculate emissions, particularly around livestock and whatnot, and the framework that the ADCC would be based on, and some people would potentially say, wow! So really, what they would want is the live weight of animals every quarter; they also would want to know what the live weight gains of the animals were every quarter; they would want to know what milk production is. The farmers enter this data in and it then calculates emissions associated with various things based on that input data. But then there's things like, you know, how many litres of diesel do you use, how many kilowatt hours of electricity do you use, how many tonnes of urea did you put out? Those kind of questions. But without a doubt it would be those questions about livestock weight and livestock gain and weight gain and stuff like that, that would probably be the most challenging for producers. So having said that, there are default values, so values that the Australian Government uses if you don't actually have any data there, and people can use that, you know, that's fine. But what people would find is that, you know, if they've got different weight animals with a lower live weight gain and higher milk production, then you're probably going to get a better outcome, that kind of thing. So it could swing either way – some people may go to their own data instead of default values and have a worse outcome. But those data requirements, I think the livestock data requirements, would probably be the ones that people would find most challenging. 

Zita Ritchie: It might be worth mentioning that New South Wales DPI has a project called the On Farm Carbon Advice Project, and look, they've got a number of forums run across the state and then also tailored information like 101 classes for different industries and boot camps, working with producers to help understand more about emissions with potential also to do whole farm carbon management plans with beef and dairy producers. They're actually piloting this in the Bega Valley region, so if there are farmers interested across the state in this project, or looking at being involved, I'll also provide a link to that project as well in the notes. Look, it's been a really interesting discussion today and it's a big topic and I think it's just useful to try and break it down into those key areas, which is what we've talked about, I think it's really great. I think before we finish, do each of you have a couple of key messages that would be good to leave people with? I’m a big fan of the key messages, particularly with this carbon space, I mean, it can get pretty overwhelming at times and there's a lot of different information out there. Are there any key things you'd like to leave the dairy industry with before we wrap it up? 

Blake Cheer: Yeah thanks, Zita. I think firstly, is just getting into that process or routine of starting to record some of these things. Aaron mentioned that, you know, the carbon calculation – we do need to be taking live weights every quarter and even just taking some numbers on our annual fertiliser usage, what sort of feeds we're importing into farm, all of those sorts of things so that it's handy and accessible for us. And secondly, just try and get a calculation done, try and have that starting point or a stick in the ground of where our emissions are at on farm and then coming into the future as the space no doubt develops, we can start to track trends over time. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, I think that's great, Blake. I think it just comes back to, know your numbers to know where you stand to start with and where you can go from there to improve. Anything else, Aaron? 

Aaron Simmons: I think my key takeaway would be that this is being driven by market access, you know, so even if you do have emissions reductions and you can get credits for them, we can't double count. So you can't sell credits for income and then claim you've got a lower emissions intensity – they can be used for one or the other. So really, if you are targeting, you know, if a farmer is targeting market access, then don't sell your credits because you need them to reduce your emissions intensity and your whole farm greenhouse gas emissions if you want. I think the other thing, you know, it would be overwhelming and farmers have got enough paperwork and other crap they need to deal with on a daily basis, so they probably just look at this and go, oh, come on! I think it'll just be a new way of looking at things, you know, there will be more data that will need to be collected, but there'll be support, you know. The other thing, for a footprint calculator, is DairyBase. So people that are in DairyBase can answer a couple of additional questions and it will give you the emissions intensity of milk production that way. So I guess don't be overwhelmed – easy for me to say when I'm thinking about this 24/7, but don't be overwhelmed because I'm confident that there will be strategies, there will be cost effective strategies, and the people that are developing these strategies do understand that if they want farmers to actually take them on board and utilise them, they need to fit in with what they're currently doing. You know, they need to be easy. It needs to be low hanging fruit. So that's at the forefront of the people that want to make money trying to do these things. It just needs to be something that fits in with their everyday operations. If it's as simple as, as an example, electrifying a tractor, well, all that means is that they hop in a tractor and drive a tractor. They just don't have to fill it up with diesel. They plug it in to charge or have a battery sitting there that's charged from solar that day, that's a minor change to what farmers have to do, you know. So people are well aware that these solutions need to fit into the current systems and anything, well, anybody that thinks that they can propose something to a farmer that doesn't actually fit into a system is probably well and truly on the road to failure before they even, you know, set out, I'd say. 

Zita Ritchie: Yeah, so the key message there is it’s got to fit in with your existing system. And also, you know, farmers aren't alone with this, like you said, there's a lot of industry support, government support. We're wanting dairy to be sustainable and viable, profitable into the future, so it's trying to work out ways that we can still achieve that while also lowering our carbon footprint. Yeah, I think that's really good notes to end on there. But look, I think that really wraps it up for today and I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Aaron and Blake, for chatting to us today about the carbon emissions story, and no doubt we'll be hearing more about this topic as more, you know, research and industry information comes about, and yeah, watch this space. But thanks very much. 

Aaron Simmons: Well, thanks for getting me here to talk about it. 

Blake Cheer: Thank you. 

Sheena Carter: Thank you for listening to this month's The Business of Dairy Podcast produced by the New South Wales Dairy Business Advisory Unit. This series is brought to you with funding and support from the Hunter Local Land Services. The show notes to this episode include links to many useful resources mentioned including the Australian Dairy Carbon Calculator, DairyBase, the on-farm Carbon Advice Project, which, for further information please contact the DPI team via their email address which is listed. And there is also a Dairy Australia online course on climate change that gives you the foundational knowledge and understanding of climate science and the risks and actions related to the dairy industry in Australia. We'd love you to share this podcast with your networks and feel free to send any feedback or suggestions for future episodes to thebusinessofdairy@gmail.com. You can also subscribe to our Facebook and Twitter feed and view or subscribe to our dairy newsletter using the links provided.