Carbon footprint labeling ..........

Cowgirl

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Ayrshire
Thought you would have got some replies as it's a great idea - trouble is, the science on how this could be worked out is inaccurate and would be a random number generator.
 

Chris F

Staff Member
Media
Location
Hammerwich
Or a tool that we will end up funding to end up with more costs, paperwork and assurance schemes so the supermarkets can still drive the prices down and buy the cheapest produce going yet market themselves as supporting British ?
Sorry I used to be an optimist but that is now how I think it will end up.

If you are carbon negative you can sell your carbons for £17 each at the moment. So might work in our favour to have a scheme that tracks them.
 
Location
southwest
Good idea but how far do you trace back the CF of a product? For instance on milk, would you just look at the CF of the dairy farm? Or include off farm transport and processing? And what if the Dairy farm imports hfrs from abroad? Or buys from a mart? Do you include the CF of the rearing of replacements?
 

Still Farming

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
South Wales UK
Could be good and bad.
You get some farmers that get payments for reductions on effects of climate change/greening etc and then plough up everything and burn loads of diesel on 3-4 grass cuts?
How will the calculations work?
 

Agrispeed

Member
Location
Cornwall
Good idea but how far do you trace back the CF of a product? For instance on milk, would you just look at the CF of the dairy farm? Or include off farm transport and processing? And what if the Dairy farm imports hfrs from abroad? Or buys from a mart? Do you include the CF of the rearing of replacements?

The trouble is there is a massive variation in farm depending on management, This farm went from emitting 300t to sequestering 350t annually in 5 years, still producing the same amount of the same end product.

Dairy products could be an interesting one - liquid milk generally comes from more intensive systems, so could be quite carbon heavy, but cheese for example is a concentrated product from farms more likely to be lower input grazing systems (generally on a solids contract) so could have a massive sequestration rate attached to it.

It would be interesting to compare grass finished systems from say NZ, and the shipping to intensively finished beef in this country.
 

Still Farming

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
South Wales UK
Another for example a farmer dairy selling its milk doorstep direct in plastic bottles and delivery carbon footprint then change to reduce plastic to bottles then suddenly extra weight ,more fuel more collections then sterilization, boiling water etc ,their worst off than plastic ,crazy?
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
Farming carbon is our future

Stop mourning the inevitable loss of subs - we don’t need them

Most farmers have no idea what they are sat on and how bright their future is - carbon is the new oil !

Had a lot of interesting meetings about this recently
 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
The problem is that you can work out carbon footprint for anything in a million different ways. It is like asking the question how long is a piece of string. And the biggest problem of all is that farmers will have absolutely no say in deciding what goes into the calculation. You only have to look at the whole "methane from ruminants is killing the planet" bandwagon to see how shocking people's perception of it all is. And it'll be the supermarkets imposing THEIR version of it that will be the one that becomes recognised widely. And do we think they're gonna be painting themselves in a poor light?
 

caveman

Member
Location
East Sussex.
The problem is that you can work out carbon footprint for anything in a million different ways. It is like asking the question how long is a piece of string. And the biggest problem of all is that farmers will have absolutely no say in deciding what goes into the calculation. You only have to look at the whole "methane from ruminants is killing the planet" bandwagon to see how shocking people's perception of it all is. And it'll be the supermarkets imposing THEIR version of it that will be the one that becomes recognised widely. And do we think they're gonna be painting themselves in a poor light?

What we do is, get assessed as to what the nett carbon footprint of a kilo of such as protien is at the farm gate, whether that protien is in the form of lamb, beef, dairy, peas or Kenyan beans.
It is then down to the retailers to add on their own carbon cost of getting the product to their shelves..
 

Still Farming

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
South Wales UK
The problem is that you can work out carbon footprint for anything in a million different ways. It is like asking the question how long is a piece of string. And the biggest problem of all is that farmers will have absolutely no say in deciding what goes into the calculation. You only have to look at the whole "methane from ruminants is killing the planet" bandwagon to see how shocking people's perception of it all is. And it'll be the supermarkets imposing THEIR version of it that will be the one that becomes recognised widely. And do we think they're gonna be painting themselves in a poor light?
Developed world and under developed and so called 3rd world countries devides ?
We cut emmissions here they pump it up over there????
 

___\0/___

Member
Location
SW Scotland
We have done our carbon footprint for a number of years using different programs. I would say they are all over simplistic and based on mostly negative impacts carbon wise from the farm.

For example if I ripped up our Forrest and made it into another grazing paddock and milk per cow went up my carbon footprint would improve.

Totally stupid but any program I have found so far can't allow for these things.

I see a lot of we are carbon neutral posts on here it would be interesting to see what a carbon audit actually comes up with.

I think it will be part of the dairy red tractor standards shortly because a lot of dairy companies already do it.

Soil sampling and VESS will not be far behind.
 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
And do these dairy companies just use "a program" on a laptop? I bet they do and therein lies the problem. I'm a first principles man, blindly using a laptop program that uses wildly simplistic assumptions leads ultimately to an utterly useless answer. And then that "answer" is used to beat us with a stick.

Someone pit a post on here a couple of months ago about the amount of water used to produce a kg of beef. It was colossal. They managed to research the findings and found out that the massive majority of the water was actually rain that landed on the ground and went straight into the rivers. And how tf is that "used" but it was still included to claim that beef production was horrendously wasteful.

I really don't know what the answer is to all of this. The rise of media and social-media guff that is being repeated around the world is turning people's heads whether we like it or not.
 

curlietailz

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Sedgefield
Ive often thought its the humans exhaling CO2 that's part of the problem, so Ive done some research:-

The WORLD population in 1900 was c1.6 billion.
In 1980 it was 4.46 billion
In 2000 it was 6.15 billion
In 2017 it was 7.53 billion
And rising
So between 1980 - 2017 ( 37 years) the world population has increased by 3.07 billion
ref:- https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/

That's an awful lot of extra CO2 being exhaled
An awful lot more poo to deal with, water to drink, oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide exhaled.
 

curlietailz

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Sedgefield
Found this interesting article.....
"Back in December 1991, Newsweek writer Jerry Adler stated: "It's a morbid observation, but if everyone on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem." Last year, after the U.S. proposed that a nation's use of so-called "carbon sinks" -- carbon dioxide-absorbing forests and grassland -- would be counted toward emission-reduction targets set by the UN, the eco-radical Climate Action Network sarcastically suggested that this should include "people who stop breathing" -- that is, the dead.
So if we're serious about beating back the supposed scourge of [CO.sub.2] "emissions," our options must include either population reduction or respiration taxes.."

Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Coming Soon: A Respiration Tax!?" The New American, 10 Sept. 2001, p. 10. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A78738304/AONE?u=tou&sid=AONE&xid=294ad3b5. Accessed 14 Aug. 2019.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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