Helen Mandeno: Current Concerns down on the Farm

My family has a problem. We have sheep and cattle on our farm that emit methane. We are told regularly we will have to cut our emissions. If we don’t, the bill will be bigger than we can afford. The threat forced us to do some reading. We had been told all scientists agree – methane is a very big problem. But we studied the issue and found something very different. The latest science surprised us, even concerned us, leading us into a tough dilemma.

What should we do?

We are fighters. We do our homework. We work from a basis of facts and truths. We have to know how stuff works – that is why we are farming and how we farm. It is the only way to be successful – stay up to date with technology and follow the latest science.

Owen Jennings: Farmers Deserve Better

My first farm was mainly old sand dunes with thirty to fifty mm’s of good soil on the tops.  We farmed cows and pigs, collected the manure and spread it on the ridges.  Within a few years we built the soil humus to 200 to 300mm’s.  We called it humus or topsoil. Today, we call it “carbon”.

In fact, we built thousands of tonnes of carbon all taken from atmosphere.  It was a ratio of 8:1 – it took eight tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere to build one tonne of carbon in the soil. We call it ‘sequestering’.  It all happens via photosynthesis and the carbon cycle you learnt at school.  CO2 in the atmosphere gets taken in by plants, animals eat plants and burp methane back into the atmosphere that eventually becomes CO2 that the next lot of plants need.

Barry Brill: Spot the culprit!

Our politicians continue to parrot the fallacy that livestock emissions contribute “nearly half” of the global warming that New Zealand supposedly causes each and every year.

This estimate is, of course, based on several erroneous assumptions – one of which is that each herd of cattle keeps adding more methane to the atmosphere every year.

The reality is that a ‘steady-state’ herd produces steady state methane. For every new molecule it emits an older molecule expires, and there is no increase at all.