How carbon negative/neutral/positive is a farm?

[spin cycle]

I wouldn't say the carbon figures would be that high from what I understand.
I am happy to be corrected.

sorry i'm a bit off......make that 2 transatlantic flights/ cow........mind you 10 million cows in uk........NOW.....london to nyc and london to dubai (similar distance)......6 million flights between them so 3 million cow equivalents in just those two routes

 

[Campani]

https://www.farmcarbontoolkit.org.uk/ THis is a farm specific calculator and advice. Not tried it personally but heard them speaking on radio 4 and they seemed very practical..

 

[neilo]

an acre of pp absorbs 1.5t of co2/yr.....a cow emits methane equivalent to 2.3t co2.....therefore 1 cow to 1 1/2 acres of pp is carbon neutral

Is that proper ryegrass pp, fed by clover, that is growing from early March until mid-October, or old parkland pp that potters along slowly after the end of May and doesn't start to green up until April?

 

[Poorbuthappy]

How much carbon does one of my 600kg suckler cows fed on grass and hay capture in a year?
I would like to have the figure to market the cow to those wishing to offset their CO2 emissions flying into and out of Davos this week.

Depends on management.
Even if all grass - set stocking, rotational grazing or mob grazed. Set stocking is said to sequester little carbon in pp.

 

[puppet]

We have the Beef Efficiency Scheme which calculates the CO2 for each live weight kg.
We produced 942 tons CO2 but 73% was from manure management or enteric production which all gets recycled.
So the 'external' CO2 was 254 tons. 3% fuel, 11% fertiliser. Trees removed 99 tons but no allowance for grass -we are 100% grass.
So produced 155 tons CO2......
....oh, and some cattle and sheep.

 

[egbert]

How much carbon does one of my 600kg suckler cows fed on grass and hay capture in a year?
I would like to have the figure to market the cow to those wishing to offset their CO2 emissions flying into and out of Davos this week.

Sadly TG, she doesn't.
She is part of a natural cycle, which is a good thing, and as such better than most things humans get up to.....
...... but the minute you fire up the tractor/quad/open a bag of fert, you're releasing stuff no-one can easily re-capture.

I especially liked the TV footage of all the gurt helicopters ticking over at Davos.
Save the world eh?

 

[ollie989898]

The industry or UK won't be carbon neutral by 2030 that I can see.

NFU could push for using HVO and going to bioplastics to enhance green credentials.

NOx could be a big stumbling block- intensive livestock would be difficult to justify.

 

[delilah]

Buying in the same quantity of food from elsewhere - what's the carbon footprint difference from the home production?

This.
There is absolutely nothing wrong our side of the farm gate, and to put our hands in the air and say "please miss, I have just worked out how bad I am" is an absolutely ludicrous line to go down. The supermarkets, road haulage federation et al must be laughing their socks off at us.

Farming should take an absolutely firm line and tell Government that if the UK is to get vaguely near net zero (whatever that means) then it needs to focus its attention on everything that goes on once it leaves our gate, ie the food chain.

It's like all this "our cows may be bad, but foreign cows are worse" bollox. Why is UK agriculture so obsessed with finding fault with itself ?

 

[spin cycle]

Is that proper ryegrass pp, fed by clover, that is growing from early March until mid-October, or old parkland pp that potters along slowly after the end of May and doesn't start to green up until April?

don't matter.....we should be 'spinning' this agin those that 'spin' agin us

 

[Muddyroads]

I’ve had a go with the farmcarbontoolkit, as I put in a previous thread. It’s reasonably straightforward to use, but a few questions I struggled with, such as it asks about implement widths without stipulating what implements.
It’s not too bad for calculating how much carbon we emit, but less so for what we sequester. I ended up putting in an estimated figure of 0.1% sequestration which resulted in us being carbon negative by 960 tonnes per year on an organic mostly pp farm.
Without annual soil testing across the range of soils we have, it’s not going to be easy, and this will be expensive.
Lots of questions need answering, such as can soils reach carbon saturation?

 

[spin cycle]

This.
There is absolutely nothing wrong our side of the farm gate, and to put our hands in the air and say "please miss, I have just worked out how bad I am" is an absolutely ludicrous line to go down. The supermarkets, road haulage federation et al must be laughing their socks off at us.

Farming should take an absolutely firm line and tell Government that if the UK is to get vaguely near net zero (whatever that means) then it needs to focus its attention on everything that goes on once it leaves our gate, ie the food chain.

It's like all this "our cows may be bad, but foreign cows are worse" bollox. Why is UK agriculture so obsessed with finding fault with itself ?

agree.....but we should be saying our cows good....foreign cows bad......as things stand i believe beef imported has zero co2 footprint for us as the co2 is blamed on country of origin

 

[topground]

an acre of pp absorbs 1.5t of co2/yr.....a cow emits methane equivalent to 2.3t co2.....therefore 1 cow to 1 1/2 acres of pp is carbon neutral

Where did this calculation come from or is it one of the dodgy statistics that dogs the whole debate?

 

[spin cycle]

farm carbon toolkit states a 2m x 100m strip of pp grass sequesters 75kg co2/yr.....so 200m2......20 times that is an acre (4000m2).....20 x 75kg is 1500kg

widely googlable about cow

 

[ajd132]

What about nitrogen use? Must be a big one

 

[Jungle Bill]

This is the only detailed farm assessment I have seen https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf . I have spent a few days on the farm and cannot see most UK beef farms being as low carbon as this.
I was also surprised to read Dr John Baker, a NZ soil scientist, saying that 15- 20% of atmospheric CO2 comes from ploughing so I think we need to get a hold on the numbers before making too many claims or the anti farm lobby will have an easy job disproving them.

 

[betweenthelines]

It's all rather complicated:

Methane is a compound (not pure carbon) and it breaks down over about ten years. A tree (like any crop) absorbs carbon while it's growing, but a mature tree but doesn't absorb much. So a whip (very young tree) absorbs a bit of carbon, a sapling a bit more etc etc. until it's fully grown and it's rate of carbon absorption decreases sharply. BUT-cut the tree down and burn, it all the stored carbon is released at once, leave it to rot and the carbon is released slowly.

Now, take a field of grass. Graze it and the animals convert the carbon to methane, which slowly breaks down in the atmosphere. Cut it for silage and you burn fuel making the silage-then there is the carbon footprint of the machinery being used (I mean when the kit was being made, not while it was being used) So an old baler having made lots of bales has a lower CF per bale, same if you use a contractor. But the contractor probably has a lot more "thirsty" tractor. Cattle eat the silage release methane......(see above)

So two identical farms, farmed in exactly the same way, with the same output might have totally different carbon footprints. Farmer A has lots of brand new kit working to a high level of efficiency, whereas Farmer B can't remember when he last bought anything new. Farmer A's kit will carry a high Carbon footprint (relative to output) whereas Farmer B's kit will have a lower CF

The answer to the question is, of course to difficult to work out.

 

[Muddyroads]

This is the only detailed farm assessment I have seen https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf . I have spent a few days on the farm and cannot see most UK beef farms being as low carbon as this.
I was also surprised to read Dr John Baker, a NZ soil scientist, saying that 15- 20% of atmospheric CO2 comes from ploughing so I think we need to get a hold on the numbers before making too many claims or the anti farm lobby will have an easy job disproving them.

For a while I’ve thought that this is one reason that the likes of the NFU may not be very supportive of these types of figures, but it is one that livestock farmers can use against vegans.
CO2 and NO4 are produced when carbon and nitrogen in the soil are exposed to air, so all arable crops will produce it, as will grass reseeds, whereas pp won’t. The exception of course being no-till systems, but what happens to these once glyphosate goes?
Going back to the OP, grazed grass will result in a certain amount of methane being produced along with meat and all the environmental benefits we know comes with livestock. Meanwhile, ungrazed grass will release methane as it rots down in the autumn and produce nothing. No idea what the difference will be between the 2.
With trees, is most of the carbon locked up in the timber, or do the roots sequester into the soil as grass does?
When trees carbon lockup is calculated, does this include the carbon released every year that leaves fall and decay?

 

[farmerm]

an acre of pp absorbs 1.5t of co2/yr.....a cow emits methane equivalent to 2.3t co2.....therefore 1 cow to 1 1/2 acres of pp is carbon neutral

What does the 75kg/200m2 figure really relate too? Is it that really what is actually permanently sequestered underground or is it merely the carbon accumulated in an acre of forage during the year? I suspect the latter! Low productivity permanent pasture produces perhaps 1/10th of the biomass of a highly productive silage lay so the sequestration figures must be massively different, but then that makes little difference... Most grazed or foraged grass will be cycled back to CO2 or CH4 in a very short space of time. This idea that farms and forests can offset the worlds fossil fuel use is a dangerous fantasy. It is extremely unlikely that in the next 50 years we can globally replant enough forests and sequester enough carbon in agricultural soils to replace what has been released though global deforestation and soil organic matter losses that have occurred in just the past 10 years. Until farming and forestry has re-banked the biomass CO2 we have contributed to global atmospheric CO2 over the past 100 years it is nonsense to think we are in a position to start to offset our own carbon footprints let alone anyone elses!!

But lets get a real perspective on this... If every farmed acre in the UK was planted with trees today it would only replace 1.2 years of global deforestation!! and lets leave aside that it would also be many decades before our new forest had sequester the equivalent CO2 released as a result of 1.2 years of deforestation. Unless changes occur at a global level any carbon trading and carbon offsetting schemes offers no more value to our society than any form of pyramid scheme, they only server to move wealth from the many and put it in the hands of a few.

 

[Top Tip.]

We have the Beef Efficiency Scheme which calculates the CO2 for each live weight kg.
We produced 942 tons CO2 but 73% was from manure management or enteric production which all gets recycled.
So the 'external' CO2 was 254 tons. 3% fuel, 11% fertiliser. Trees removed 99 tons but no allowance for grass -we are 100% grass.
So produced 155 tons CO2......
....oh, and some cattle and sheep.

We did the same calculation absolutely infuriated me when the guy said they weren’t counting carbon sequestrated by grass because they couldn’t measure it.?

 

[Muddyroads]

I’d love to have some reliable figures of grassland versus trees to counter my landlords enthusiasm for mass tree planting. The argument that carbon storage via trees is only temporary doesn’t seem to be very persuasive.