DAIRY FARMING is the worst speciality for intensive greenhouse gas emissions. Beef production comes next, according to a new league table.
Greenhouses give fruit and salad growing a high score, because of the cost of heating them, and cereals from lowland plains cost the planet more per acre than upland sheep farms.
But the conclusions do not take productivity into account and pig an
d poultry farms were not included. The table is an indicator of how agriculture should prepare for the kind of emissions targets which are already putting a tax on fuel use by heavy industry.
Natural England, Defra's environmental law enforcement arm, produced the table using the Country Land & Business Association's new online calculator, Carbon Emissions for Land Managers (CALM). The Carbon Baseline Survey Project, based on a survey of 200 farms, and produced by agricultural consultancy, the Laurence Gould Partnership, with East Anglia University is such a relatively small survey it was decided not to include pig and poultry farms or organic versions of any farms.
The report makes clear that there are still holes in the CALM formula – with no provision for the environmental costs of imported feed, for example. But the league table gives farmers something to check their own figures against while work on details continues.
The authors say farmers are aware of the need to cut their direct consumption of fossil fuels, but are less aware that their production of nitrous oxides, from fertilisers, and methane, from grass-eating animals, is likely to cause more "global warming" than their tractors. Carbon dioxide is the main problem only in horticulture.
The CLA calculator is at www.calm.cla.org.uk
Livestock leads gas table
The CALM calculator converted all greenhouse gas emissions into their equivalent in tonnes of carbon turned into CO2
in a table of rough per-hectare estimates:
1 Dairy – 10.68.
2 Lowland grazing livestock – 5.55.
3 Mixed farming – 4.21.
4 Horticulture (market garden and glasshouse production) – 4.18.
5 General cropping (traditional field vegetables) – 3.22.
6 Cereals – 2.82.
7 Grazing livestock in "less favoured areas"
– 2.50.
8 Nature reserves – 2.46.
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