Dom George from Rural Exchange & Owen Jennings to unpack his keynote at the World Association of Sustainable Livestock Conference in Spain. They dive into why NZ is pouring over a billion dollars into methane mitigation research for a problem Owen argues barely exists—and how current methane accounting protocols inflate New Zealand’s warming impact by a staggering 300 to 400%.

Our farmers are ‘carbon neutral’ to use a typical brain-dead expression, often vaunted by what is now a massive international time and money-wasting clobbering machine.  Warming measuring technologies in agriculture designed by technocrats who wouldn’t know a cow from a car, are hurting farming and sucking up state funds. 
We are recklessly throwing taxpayer funds at a non-existent problem while Kiwis can’t afford a doctor’s visit and disabled wait for better care.  Over a billion dollars have gone into this frivolous exercise.

Extract: I think we need to be very careful that what we're doing is practical, it's scalable, it's cheap, because we’ve had this weird fascination of intensive, expensive interference with our advantage which is actually a resource advantage for New Zealand as our low input pasture raised system. So we've got to be very careful we don't turn ourselves into an EU type of scenario. And I also think that all of these things also can be a bit of a excuse for intensifying agriculture, and that is not the way that we should be going in terms of GE. .. all of this technology that's disguised as something that we need, when actually we need to make sure that we are promoting everything that we do naturally ..

Platform: Sean Plunket talks to the former National President of Federated Farmers Owen Jennings about New Zealand's methane emission targets.
.. that New Zealand's ruminant emissions which come from our sheep and cattle have been steadily reducing factor way back to about 2005 but particularly since 2015. And what that means and this is not readily understood is that the pool of methane in the atmosphere coming from our stock is reducing in size.

Owen Jennings, respected New Zealand farmer, former MP, and long-standing agricultural leader, will represent New Zealand at the II Congreso Mundial de Ganadería Sostenible (II World Congress on Sustainable Livestock) to be held in Extremadura, Spain, from 12–15 November 2025.

“Power and food inflation, actually food inflation. If you're thinking you're paying enough the butter at the moment and it's very expensive, well fasten your seat belt, because once we add the true cost of Paris, and their technology, initiatives, additives, boluses, pills, potions, plus land use change; just to tick the Paris box, wait and see! … I was thinking about this morning on the farm. As a country, we seem to be terrified of the wrong things. We seem to be terrified of what highly subsidised, heavily populated industrial countries think of us more so than protecting and promoting our natural competitive advantage, which actually is using our resources, our water, our highly productive soils, our hill country to our advantage, our grass feed protein.

The Country:McDonald's, a wealthy global junk food company, saying that New Zealand farmers should actually be thanking them, because instead of paying as a premium for our naturally pasture raised, free range red meat, they're going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars “to fund projects to help New Zealand farmers with their on farm management”. Well, bugger me. I'm not sure that we need McDonald's to be telling us, how to improve our farm productivity!
We're spending far too much time listening to sermons from desk sitters & junk food companies, not enough promoting our unique, biodiverse productivity to the world.

Peter Foster of the Methane Science Accord joins Jaspreet Boparai and Don Nicolson to critique the Government's methane science review panel, accusing it of sidelining key experts and ignoring crucial data. Foster argues the panel was predisposed toward maintaining the status quo, dismissing international findings that question methane's climate impact. With claims that global warming potential metrics are flawed and New Zealand livestock emissions are near-negligible, they call out what they see as decades of scientific groupthink and political inaction. A passionate discussion that challenges the mainstream narrative and calls for an open, evidence-based debate.

Scientist Peter Foster sits down with Don Nicolson and Jaspreet Boparai to discuss a letter to PM Christopher Luxon from 26 climate scientists opposing New Zealand’s proposed shift to a “no additional warming” biogenic methane target. Critically examining the scientific claims the letter makes, arguing that methane’s role in warming is overstated without global concentration increases. Peter is worried that New Zealand’s agricultural sector is being pressured by unfounded science, misguided corporate responses, and international expectations, while claiming many solutions pushed on farmers are unworkable and profit-driven.

Yesterday's big news story the release of the Ruminant Methane Survey report from Groundswell and NZ Farming and the Methane Science Accord.
I guess if the National Party and Beef & Lamb and AgriZero etc, took the time to go to a woolshed in Taihape or a country hall somewhere, basically farmers have had enough of playing the scapegoat and there's benefits for all of New Zealanders if we actually calculate methane right and move on, and stop wasting so much money and time and quasi research time into this fast.
Jane; 420 thousand followers of either New Zealand Farming Groundswell or the Methane Science Accord. That is a huge sample…

Don Nicolson + Jaspreet Boparai + Owen Jennings, dissect findings of landmark farmer-led survey that throws a spanner in the works of New Zealand's methane and nitrous oxide tax narrative. Over 1,400 responses, the results reveal overwhelming opposition to enforced mitigation tools, scepticism of the science behind agricultural methane emissions, and growing frustration with taxpayer-funded initiatives seen as out of touch with on-farm reality. Questions whether New Zealand's rural voice is truly being heard—or quietly sidelined.

We've wasted time, money, focus and resources that we don't actually have. We’re potentially up for 24 billion dollars in the next five years for net zero. That's twelve thousand household and a country that can't afford its own healthcare… We've got a real leadership role to play here. And actually we shouldn't be apologising for the fact that our admission's profile have a high proportion of natural biogenic emissions. We should be really proud of that. We should be saying; mate, this is really great news. We can forge ahead and forge a different pathway and because … I called it a fiscal folly before, but it's actually economic espionage if we carry on the same pathway.

Professor Jack Heinemann ‘You can package gene editors as pesticides and spray them from airplanes onto fields, and they won’t distinguish between a plant, a cow, a microbe, or a fungus or a human being. Those chemistries don’t know the difference. They are able to carry these gene editing tools into the cells of anything ’..
It’s not that [your cows] may have had a history of eating a GMO, they may be in real time an actual GMO or contaminated with actual GMO’s. that are inseparable from them because of this unregulated use of the gene editors outside of the containment facility.

Prepare for more pine trees. That's the message from North Otago farmer Jane Smith following the new methane emission targets recently announced by the Government.
Smith, a founding member of the Methane Science Accord, says farmers are aghast at the "environmentally ignorant and economically inept" greenhouse gas emissions targets. "Even worse than previous targets … Nats have now shown their anaemically weak understanding of science …”

Extract: They're actually looking for some leadership from a country that has the majority of its emissions from food production and is decreasing them. So we could have taken the leadership stance on this and actually say, you know what; we're a food and fiber producing country. We're already punching above our weight. We're not going to risk our efficiency. We're actually producers of a natural protein. .. And actually take a stance; [instead] just we have this sort of limp-wristed [response]

"The Methane Review Panel have strayed from science and been swept up in politics to justify continuing the methane money train" states Jane Smith, Chair of the Methane Science Accord regarding today's announcement by a Crown-appointed Review Panel to recommend continued methane reduction regulation targets for New Zealand ruminants.

Jaspreet Boparai and Don Nicolson are joined by Owen Jennings and Deborah Alexander to discuss NZ Methane Review panel findings, calling out major scientific omissions and potential conflicts of interest, exposing how the panel's flawed metrics and questionable data could unfairly target Kiwi farmers. Host Don called out the Methane Science Review as a sop (a thing of no great value done to appease someone whose main concerns or demands are not being met.)

RCR, Owen Jennings, joins Jaspreet Boparai and Don Nicolson to discuss the Methane Science Review underway and the ongoing obstacles to getting vital articles about methane published.

.. they're selecting sheep on supposedly low methane. Now, this is about as useful as selecting an Olympic athlete on eye colour … potentially decreasing genuine traits, like growth, survival, etc. And it will be irresponsible to start selecting your sheep and cattle, just to take a short term political box .. You're going to decrease in other areas, in order to select for methane. But also potentially its showing that they have smaller rumens, [low methane sheep] are selectively grazing, so likely a very fussy eater .. is like, someone that's had a gastric bypass who needs a very high quality diet in order to eat. So if you put someone like that, out the back on the hill all winter, they would not survive. And thats is a really concerning. Something may work single trait looking at it in a laboratory but actually out in the field ..

Peter Foster and Owen Jennings from The Methane Science Accord, join RCR’s Jaspreet Boparai and Don Nicolson to discuss the Government’s Pending Methane Science & Target Report – Science Or Straight Politics?
Methane Science Accord express their reservations about the Government’s pending methane science and target report, and the attempts to model the immeasurable.