Palmerston North - GHG's

After meetings with six different scientist I have certainly learnt a lot about greenhouse gas emissions in Palmerston North.                            As New Zealand is such a green country, agriculture and in particular ruminants are responsible for a large amount of the greenhouse gas emissions in NZ and this is the reason why so much research is being carried out here. They all felt strongly that many things that had been suggested, are not as good as they are sometimes made out to be and have not always worked when they tested it in the chambers. They may work on the laboratory level but they need to get it to work on the animal level. There are three main ways of testing it on an animals level, FS6, greenfix and the chambers. They found that FS-6 is quite variable and not replicated in chambers. Chambers are more accurate. Since they first installed the chambers they have compared lambs and ewes, grass quality, lactating ewes, cattle and sheep, beef and dairy cattle and done some alpaca work. The greenfield system is more accurate than PS2 but there are issues with some animals going in more regularly than others and concentrates are not used that much in NZ. 

They feel the four challenges are manipulating rumen function, reducing nitrous oxide emissions from soil, manipulating the rates of soil carbon change and creating tools for farmers decision making. The six key objectives are:
1.Rumen microbial ecology and rumen microbial strategies to reduce methane emissions
2. Methanogen genomics
3. Methanogen vaccines
4. Exploiting animal to animal variation
5. Low GHG emitting farm systems
6. Nitrous Oxide Mitigation
The main area of research and progress has been with nitrous oxide. Applying DCD can reduce nitrous oxide by 70%. The problem is breaks down at 12 degrees celcius. The next biggest break through has been finding low and high emitting ewes. These have been mated with low and high emitting rams and they are investigating this further with the offspring. There is 9-40% difference in animals. However heritability has a low value.

They have also found variation in pasture (high sugar grass and brassicas lower emissions). One trial showed that brassicas reduce emissions by 20%.
They are working on vaccines and inhibitory compounds to raise antibodies in animals against the gut bacteria that produces the methane. The question is is this successful how much will the vaccine cost and will it be worthwhile. Carbon trading is also a reason for research in this area and a lot of decisions remain to be made. It is likely that the processors will be the point of obligation e.g. milk factory, meat processor etc rather than the 40,000 farmers. This will reduce it to around 300 points of obligation and average it out across the farmers. It may be possible for farms to claim they are better than average but then this creates a lot of work to prove it. Improving intensity may reduce liability. There is now becoming more of a focus on emission intensity. Emission intensity has been reduced in the sheep sector by over 20% as they have 20 million less sheep but the same amount of lamb produced. However intensification and dairying has increased Nitrous Oxide emissions.