Media Release

4 August 2009

Agricultural Greenhouse Gases Should Be Exempt 

A New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme which includes agricultural greenhouse gases is wrong

Deer Industry New Zealand remains very concerned that the New Zealand government appears intent on including agricultural greenhouses gases in the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme.

Independent carbon services company, Greenco, calculated that the net cost to a single deer, sheep and beef farm in North Canterbury would be $187,000 per annum assuming a carbon price of $25 per tonne and full inclusion of agriculture in the scheme.

The farm, Mendip Hills, is a model farm in terms of soil and water management. It is a local leader as a deer industry focus farm and it is committed to sustainability and productivity improvement. The focus farm is a community project to learn and share knowledge to improve farm productivity and sustainability. The project organiser, Tony Pearse, comments that the local farming community is struggling to understand the logic behind agriculture’s inclusion in the scheme. “Our environmental impact is minimised and we are always working to improve it. The world needs food now and will need much more as the global population expands by three billion people over the next 30 years. There is close to nothing that an extensive operation can do to reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions at the moment”.

Deer Industry New Zealand’s chairman, John Scurr, comments “No other country in the world is including agricultural emissions in their own schemes. This is because they understand that food production is fundamental to human existence and there are more sensible ways to reduce carbon emissions. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels by changing the way we generate and use energy is what need to be done.

There does need to be work done to understand how we can reduce agricultural emissions so that pastoral sector can do its part. That’s why the deer industry has invested in the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium since 2002. The consortium undertakes research to find solutions to agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. But until there are practical ways for farmers to reduce emissions, it makes no sense to bring New Zealand agriculture into an Emissions Trading Scheme.”

Deer Industry New Zealand’s view is that even a scheme which slowly brings agriculture in is wrong. “Death by a 1,000 paper cuts is little better and we believe that the signal that a scheme sends that our farmers are doing something wrong is unfair” said John Scurr.

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