A New Zealand Environmental Success Story
The farmers of New Zealand can feed all of Canada. Or the entire population of Poland. Or every person in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, or Ukraine.
Take your pick. From our small, southern hemisphere islands, we produce enough food to feed a nation of about 40 million people.
New Zealanders number barely more than 5 million. Agriculture is our biggest economic sector and we export most of what we produce: dairy, meat, fruits, vegetables, wines, and more.
This is a huge contribution to international food security.
And it’s even better than these numbers suggest because not all food is the same. Red meat protein is one of our top products and it’s packed with nutrients. Calculating levels of nutrition per kilogram puts us in an even stronger position.
As a farmer who works about 3,000 acres with my husband and our stud herds of Angus beef and Perendale sheep in New Zealand’s Otago region, on the South Island, I’m proud to be a part of this amazing success story.
Yet we’re constantly blamed for making the world worse, with the accusation that our livestock emit the greenhouse gases that drive climate change. That’s because ruminants, through their ordinary processes of digestion, emit methane.
To put it bluntly, the burps and farts of cows and sheep in New Zealand are said to be major sources of global warming.
Constantly we hear a single statistic: Nearly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gases come from agriculture. The media repeats it incessantly. It’s a popular but inaccurate talking point that uses “gross” methane output emissions utilising an acknowledged outdated metric, but few people stop to think about what it means. And too few of us get to ask, “Where does methane come from?”
Our emissions are in fact low and they’re falling, due to the efforts of farmers who strive for efficiency and sustainability. And we have been achieving these efficiencies without state help: New Zealand agriculture has been completely unsubsidized since 1984.
Climate scientist, Professor David Frame has estimated that between 1850 and 2000, New Zealand’s livestock has caused the earth to warm by 0.0014 degrees Celsius. By 2100, it might contribute, at worst, a mere 0.0004 degrees Celsius.
That’s about four-millionths of a degree per year. As the farmer and former member of Parliament Owen Jennings has described it: “an inconsequential, immeasurable, and utterly irrelevant contribution.”
Our methane emissions are among the lowest in the world per kilogram of food—and falling year by year. They’re even smaller when accounting for our vast tracts of native vegetation and trees. We’ve made incredible genetic progress with our livestock. This has led to many improvements, including animals that release less methane per unit of product due to our efficient pastoral systems that we have finely tuned to fit the land in a sustainable manner: low-input, GE-free and free-range.
What’s more, methane doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from carbon dioxide that already was in the atmosphere and taken up by grass through photosynthesis, and ultimately it goes right back where it came from. It’s a circular system, and it’s completely different from the greenhouses gases that come from burning fossil fuels.
Even so, careless people commonly conflate the two. They create what I’ve called “factose intolerance” about farming, and especially about the true sources of climate change.
New Zealand is not a methane villain. It’s a model.
A new advisory panel gives us a chance to correct recent mistakes. Chaired by Nicola Shadbolt, who has practical knowledge about livestock, it will take a close look at New Zealand’s commitment to reduce methane. She’s joined by a group of academics. I wish they had more hands-on agricultural experience—farmers need to have voices on panels such as this—but I’m hopeful that they’ll propose common-sense, science-based reforms.
We desperately need them because the government’s current goals are too aggressive. They demand that farmers cut methane emissions by 10 percent by 2030 and by as much as 47 percent by 2050. These numbers are not achievable because they are not based on sound science. They’re just the wishes of people who have little idea of what farmers do or how food production really works.
No matter what happens, New Zealand’s already-low levels of methane emissions will keep on shrinking—especially if farmers are allowed to run their farms as they know best, rather than regulated by politicians and bureaucrats who are ignorant about agriculture.
Let farmers farm: That’s how our little country will continue to help feed ourselves and the world sustainably and in an environmentally friendly way.