Last week at the ABARE conference Tony Burke Federal Minister for Agriculture announced two new research initiatives.
The Soil Carbon Research Program will be a $20 million project to look at changes in carbon in soil, how different climates effect carbon levels, as well as the effect of farm management and stocking rates.
A second initiative, the $12 million Nitrous Oxide Research Project, will look at the role these emissions play in the agriculture sector.
That much from the ABC report. It is clear that the research is intended to help farm productivity as well as help government decision making with respect to the CPRS. A decision will be made in 2013 about whether agriculture will be included in an emissions trading scheme after 2015. Clearly the government would like to move in that direction.
Actually from this report we learn that there is a third element, $1.3 million to research how climate change will affect the nation’s primary industries.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the funding will help establish a research network under the auspices of Land and Water Australia.
“This research network will help us adapt to climate change by building knowledge in areas including water use in agriculture, landscape management systems, and the capacity of plant and animal resources to adapt to climate change,” Senator Wong said.
The work is part of a broader $126 million climate change adaption program.
Tony Burke sees the soil carbon research as:
measuring carbon levels in agricultural systems, understanding the impacts of management practices in soil carbon, and the role Australian soils could play in sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The minister’s press release highlights:
Nine soil carbon research projects will sample a range of agricultural systems, including cereal crops, sheep and beef grazing, sugarcane and vegetable farming, irrigated and non-irrigated dairy, and sites which have changed from one farming system to another.
Nine nitrous oxide research projects will monitor emissions from soils in five key farming systems – sugar cane, cotton, dairy pasture, non-irrigated and irrigated cereal cropping. (Emphasis added)
(The ministerial has some routine chest thumping. If you want to read the irrelevant carping of opposition spokesperson go to the news item mysteriously penned verbatim by scribes simultaneously all around the country from the Tweed Daily News to the SMH. Presumably it was supplied by the AAP.)
You may recall that there was considerable discussion about soil carbon storage on this post, where we were informed variously by Ambigulous, myriad and murph the surf. Murph linked to work done by the NSW government on soil carbon and biochar. Here are some extracts from the Executive Summary of a scoping paper on soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration potential for agriculture:
SOC is part of the global C cycle and the global SOC pool (1580 Gt) is twice as large as that in the atmosphere and nearly three times that of the vegetation biomass carbon pool. Soil organic carbon sequestration refers to the storage of carbon in soil and is being considered as a strategy for mitigating climate change. Globally as well as for some individual countries, it has been estimated that SOC sequestration has the potential to mitigate 5-14% of total annual greenhouse gas emissions for the next 50-100 years. However, whether this potential is achieved depends on economic, social and political factors.
As a rough estimate, total SOC sequestration potential from pasture land, cropping land and rangelands amounts to 4.9 Mt C/yr (18 Mt CO2e/yr), which is equivalent to 11% of the total GHG emission from NSW in 2005.
In order to support a role for soil organic carbon in emissions trading, there is an urgent need to resolve several key research issues, namely developing low cost methods of accounting for soil carbon; quantifying net carbon sequestration under different management practices for different soil types, climates and agricultural systems by supporting existing long term cropping rotation trial sites and the establishment of new ones where appropriate; quantifying interactions of SOC sequestration with soil emissions of other GHG, namely N2O and CH4 and developing soil carbon models that can account for locally relevant agricultural management practices.
It is important to resolve outstanding research questions as a matter of urgency, to remove this barrier to inclusion of soil carbon in emissions trading.
Meanwhile farmers say that costs will rise from carbon trading, for example fertiliser, fuel and steel while beef producer Trevor Wilson, from the New South Wales North Coast, says:
scientists have figured his farm captures more carbon than he emits.
“(In) my pasture grazing system, which is a managed rotation, I have sequestered enough carbon in the last six years to cover my carbon emissions from my cows for 125 years.”
So there!
Very welcome news, and thanks for the post. If soil carbon (esp agricultural, managed forests, untouched forests) represents significant stores of C, and significant flows of C, then it’d be foolish to leave those out. How low can we get the “margins of error” thouGH?
Interesting that nitrous oxide is focussed on. Methane is the gas that’s usually highlighted.
cheerio
I wonder whether Trevor Wilson is taking into account the methane emitted from his cows.
It sounds like a move in the right direction, but $1.3 million is a pathetically small amount of money for research. That’s the kind of dough Toyota waste on redesigning their door lock knobs. At what point are they going to get serious?
This is a fairly blatant attempt to con/convince farmers they will be recieving money under an ETS scheme rather than paying it. So being able to offset farting sheep with low till farming practices (Which is a good goal in itself, it was recently found that using older mould board plough methods once every 5 or so years was extremely effective in reducing weed growth without chemicals, avoiding resistance problems).
The self interest of the cockies shows through in much of the ABCs’ reporting on the country hour. Some of the figures are v-large indeed.
Either cockies are deluding themselves or they are setting themselves up to remove money from ????? to give to themselves.
Robert, Trevor Wilson would be and look a complete dill if he wasn’t taking into account the methane from his cows.
But we don’t know the balance of his operations. Also we don’t know how viable the strategy is long term. On the other thread murph told us that 3% carbon was about the max, or up to 7% in peat style soils. We have no idea what Wilson’s starting and finishing levels of carbon were and whether he can sustain his present claimed level of sequestration for a decade, decades, or centuries.
My attitude is that if we are going to solve this global warming thing, we’ll need to cast the net wide and measure everything that’s measurable and estimate the rest. How the money flows to encourage and reward desirable behaviour has to be faced. i think notions of seeing this as an attempt on the part of the farmers to milk the public purse are misplaced.
Nevertheless you would expect every group to stick up for their own interests. And the public generally need to realise that in the longer term food security is going to be an issue. So we need to get the farmers inside the tent if possible on this one.
Nitrous oxide?
The main greenhouse gases emitted from agriculture are methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both powerful gases with 21 and 310 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) respectively. Nationally, agriculture is the dominant source of both methane (60%) and nitrous oxide (84%).
– Greenhouse in Agriculture, “Project sheet February 2008″, Victorian DPI
Ambigulous #1 – Yes, methane from livestock is about 11% of Australia’s total emissions. There’s another chunk of the R&D program that’s addressing methane emissions, it was announced before Christmas.
Mole #4 – I get to hear what the people who advise farmers are thinking, and no-one is looking at the CPRS as anything but an economic cost. Input costs will go up if agriculture is not covered by the scheme, and if it is covered then the cost of permits for the methane emissions will be dire (try the Australian Farm Institute for more on this). From the industry point of view, credits for carbon sequestration in the soil is about reducing losses rather than making gains.
Sorry to spoil the joke, BTW, but most of the methane is burped…
As I pointed out on the earlier thread, there are huge claims made, for example by Dr Christine Jones in a Landline story:
andrew_m, do you (or anyone else) have any idea whether she’s for real or away with the fairies?
Clearly the whole thing needs sorting out, which is one of the stated aims of the research.
Ambi, James Hansen reckons we should have separate international programs to tackle each of the Kyoto GHGs. The information you give about NO2 supports this notion.
Brian
That suggestion of separate agreements for each major GHG sounds sensible and workable.
cheers
andrew_m #7 I believe you represented the dominate viewpoint within rural industries on the subject in your reply to mole. There will be no cash cow when agriculture comes into the scheme & in the meantime an extra cost burden has been added especially in freight costs.
Can anyone tell me where the research has been done to back up the 11% of total emissions is from methane from livestock. As far as I’m aware the work on how much methane is burped was researched in Europe in winter barn conditions on grain type rations. Has there been any completed research on livestock emissions on natural feed in Australian rangeland conditions? I’m aware that CSIRO was doing this research at their Rockhampton research station. Did this research survive the Federal Government closing down the Rockhampton station last year?
Brian, I too heard the report from northern NSW of sequencing enough carbon in 6 years to cover his operation for 125. I would like to see this reviewed; claims based on unsound science will do not one any good. However I do know of other audits that carbon sequenced far out weighs all greenhouse gases emitted. Dr Christine Jones is onto something especially in regards to grazing regimes, but for her to suggest that you can sod seed crops in most Australian conditions, she may be down the bottom of the garden with that one. To say we can sequester the whole world’s emissions of carbon does seem over the top.
The cycle of carbon flows in the soil is a complex one. If you do not understand this system I would recommend the book Carbon Grazing by Alan Lauder. The author is a grazier– ecologist, a range of scientific experts reviewed this book before publication. In my opinion the sign of true brilliance is someone who can explain something complex simply. This book will enable you to get a handle on the subject quickly. It is published by Saltbush Systems located at THE GAP.
What I wrote above looks like a free ad, sorry it’s not intended to be, I have no contacts at all to the author or publisher, it is just my latest read.
Some more resources courtesy of my employer:
Meat and Livestock Australia Climate Change Resources
Some of it is a touch out of date – I think andrew_m’s 11% figure is still pretty reasonable in the Australian context given that it’s closely linked to feed efficiency. My impression is that feed efficiency is how lowering methane is being primarily investigated.
feed efficiency, possibly breeding animals who emit less; poorly kept animals may emit more than well-looked after animals…; then what about reducing methane from dairy waste slurry ponds (or collecting and burning the methane for power generation?); several approaches I think, David Rubie
Ambigulous – genetics takes time and while it can be very effective (we’ve had some stunning results from reducing worm egg burden in sheep for example over a 10 year time period) it’s also incredibly expensive in the short term and largely ineffective if you can’t come up with a “field measurement” that ordinary farmers can use to submit for objective analysis.
There are some moves on the genetic side for methane emissions. I know bugger all about dairy cattle but I believe that ordinary feed lots are actually worse for methane emissions than dairy operations – can’t find the reference for it at the moment. Either way, it’s waste and it costs cockies money and it’s in their interests to reduce it regardless of the climate impact (sad but true).
If some smart scientist could prove to a coal burning operation that the escaped C02 was costing them money, they’d fix it ASAP. Unfortunately we are reduced to carbon permits as a poor method for this at the moment – I’m really surprised the libertarian wingnuts haven’t jumped up and down excitedly explaining about how property rights over the atmosphere could fix it all in a heartbeat
As a crop farmer myself there is no way farmers will make any money out of these carbon credits for carbon sequestration. We simply cannot sequester enough carbon at any realistic carbon price to make it worthwhile, let alone offset costs incurred. I read a research article a while back that stated it would cost more to sample the different soil types in different paddocks continually over time to monitor what the soil carbon was doing than would be the value of the Carbon in the soil. I think they were working on a value for Carbon of $20/tonne.
The only way a cropping farmer can increase Carbon in the soil is to not remove or destroy crop residues. At some stage though the Carbon in the soil and the micro-organisms that consume it come into balance and the carbon content cannot be increased further. Good farmers have been increasing their organic carbon levels up to this ceiling for years, so introducing a scheme like this now would just be rewarding poor farmers for emitting this Carbon Dioxide they should have been storing for their own benefit for years.
As for Nitrous Oxide emissions, this occurs when waterlogging occurs in fields causing Oxygen to become unavailable to soil micro-organisms. Some of these little critters are then able to consume the N and therefore emit Nitrous Oxide. I’m somewhat surprised at all the chest thumping and claims of solving problems by pouring money into these projects. It’s great news clearly, but the Cotton and Grains research organisations at least have spent millions of dollars over the last 5 years or so on this very topic, almost to a word. I don’t know what extra information Penny Wong hopes to get from throwing more money at it, the farmers themselves have seen the problem coming and have quantified these emissions in different cropping systems using their own levies.
Luckily in the sub tropical climates, denitrification isn’t a huge problem due to the interaction of temperature and cropping and rainfall patterns. There are certainly ways it can be minimalised, and this research has long been done and is widely known and used. Farmers do not want to see this occur as they spend a lot of money building up soil Nitrogen reserves and to have denitrification occur is literally seeing your money disappear into thin air.
Good on you, Amypa.
I suspect the general public is not aware of how much of the agricultural industry levy dollar goes into targetted agricultural research in Australia: not just into marketing and export drives, but into improving efficiency and reducing environmental impacts, improving farming prectices for the long term, etc.
Being production based, the levy dollar is not regressive (not proghressive either).