New Zealand Listener – August 24, 2019

AUGUST 24 2019 LISTENER 15

into play. Submitters are telling the select

committee that vital investment could be

jeopardised if targets are too tough too soon,

especially given what’s widely recognised as

the banking sector’s over-exposure to farm

debt.

Crucially, agri-businesses with overseas

investors, including fertiliser companies, say

their backers will not fund research or new

technology here if local earnings capacity

dries up or looks uncertain.

The latest IPCC report has redoubled

the dismay farmers feel at being expected

to be first in and hardest charging of the

climate-mitigation cavalry. As Hoggard told

Parliament, “It seems easier to tell people to

eat less animal-based protein than it is to

cut back on trips to Bali.” Federated Farm-

ers says the Zero Carbon Bill has taken the

IPCC’s general guidelines too literally when

it was never intended as a “cut and paste”

for every country. Hoggard says, if guided by

science, New Zealand agriculture needs to

reduce methane by about 0.3% a year to get

to zero net emissions by 2050. That would

require much less drastic cuts than the 10%,

rising to 47%, that is being proposed.

The farm sector is in a position reminiscent

of the classic TV game-show conundrum,

“The money or the bag?” Should it accept

the Zero Carbon Bill’s emissions targets as set

provisionally by politicians, or lobby for the

yet-to-be-established independent Climate

Change Commission to set them instead,

in the hope that it will be more lenient? As

it’s as yet unknown who will be on the com-

mission, and how much weight it will give

to agricultural and business considerations,

the choice of where to put lobbying efforts

is a gamble.

The commission will have the primary

say over the targets’ range into the future,

but some in the sector are worried that

settling for the bill’s existing targets as a start-

ing point will get its adaptation to climate

change off to a hobbled, stumbling start.

Farmers are basing their call for an emis-

sions-target delay on the emergence of

new carbon-reducing technologies. From

robo-vac-style machines that rove pastures

neutralising cattle dung, to the eagerly

awaited gene-edited rye grass being trialled

in the US, help is on the way. The farm sector

is telling Parliament it can lead the world in

applying these improvements, and it has an

ally in Lincoln University’s Lincoln Agritech.

It has many research irons in the fire for sus-

tainability and productivity. Chief executive

Peter Barrowclough says farmers are “not

sticking their heads in the sand”, and are

capable of being green exemplars in their

adaptation to climate-change strictures.

Although New Zealand is responsible for

only a tiny percentage of the world’s carbon

emissions – somewhere between 0.1 and

0.4% – Barrowclough says we can definitely

take a lead role in helping the rest of the

planet clean up its agricultural act. “I don’t

disagree with vegans and vegetarians saying

we need an urgent call for action, but I don’t

think people will give up meat that easily.

It is part of a balanced diet and we have a

long history with it, but we do need to be

sure that meat is produced in the most sus-

tainable way.”

Among Lincoln Agritech’s projects are

new groundwater sensors, which measure

concentrations of nitrates; standoff pads or

voluntary “herd homes” that allow efflu-

ent to be collected, stored and separated,

then spread evenly over paddocks; new

cereal catch crops to mop up soil nitrates;

and sensors for better targeting of nitrogen

HA

GE

N

HO

PK

IN

S

Agriculture has been

placed at the front line

of the climate’s defence

• and in the place where

the toughest trade-

offs should be made.

1. Andrew
   Hoggard. 2 Peter
   Barrowclough.


2. Todd Muller.


3. James Shaw.

1

3

2

4

“It seems easier to tell

people to eat less animal-

based protein than it is to

cut back on trips to Bali.”