Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the New Zealand government, so long as farmers continue productivity improvements, increasing the meat content per head of cattle, it should be possible to maintain current meat production with a substantially reduced cattle head count.
Electric cars, fewer cows in New Zealand’s climate change plan
Sun, 31 January 2021, 1:46 pm
New Zealand unveiled a blueprint Sunday to phase out petrol-powered cars while its dairy industry, a key pillar of the economy, must slash cow numbers under the ambitious plan to be carbon neutral by 2050.
The changes are among a raft of recommendations presented to the government by the Climate Change Commission on steps New Zealand must take to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change.
…
To reduce methane gas levels, the report said farmers needed to improve animal performance while reducing stock numbers by around 15 percent from 2018 levels by 2030.
“If farmers can continue to achieve productivity improvements in line with historic trends, these outcomes could be achieved while maintaining total production at a similar level to today,” the report said.
…
Read more: https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-cars-fewer-cows-zealands-034639470.html
The draft report is available here.
A plan to breed fast growing, larger cattle allows bureaucrats to tick the climate friendly cattle head count reduction box, without actually impacting meat production and consumption.
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The anti-GMO masses won’t mind if the right green ad teams go to work on the problem.
I reckon Kiwis were in happier times when it was only their sheep that were getting shafted.
Now it’s the citizens as well.
They certainly know how to set off a farm spending arms race. That’s how the ethanol mandate got started.
I won’t bother running down the link but in May 2019, the ABC in Australia ran a story about a NZ scientist who was developing a plan for a feeding process for NZ cows to produce 10% less methane in their daily diet.
This was said to be imperative because about 50% of New Zealand’s man made (or animal) emissions came from its agriculture.
I am sure someone whose time is not taken up with designing larger cows is still beavering away on that project.
The New York Times TV Reviewer has noted that with the departure of President Trump “Saturday Night Live” is failing badly with its satiric reviews.
This should provide some welcome material for SNL.
There’s already at least one study that indicates NZ beef and lamb might already be net zero.
So if that sector makes up 50% of our total, doesn’t that mean our total is also zero?
Wow, our work is done!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.farminguk.com/news/amp/nz-beef-and-lamb-farms-well-on-the-way-to-net-zero_56702.html
Chris,
Thanks for the link.
I can’t follow your mathematics but I like the thought.
It means that about 26 million sheep and some 6 million NZ cattle and countless pigs are no longer on death row.
NZ had excused or deferred agriculture from its carbon emissions regime until 2025 instead of being included in July last.
Maybe the farmers get a free pass now that they are effectively net zero!
NEW ZEALAND LEADS THE WORLD….AS GOES NEW ZEALAND, SO GOES THE WORLD. There are smart people in NZ but they are not in the government…..like many other places.
I am sure that New Zealand’s breeding larger cattle will solve all of our climate problems for now and for all time. Way to go New Zealand! Now the rest of the world no longer needs to waste any more money regarding climate change. Of course I thought the climate problem had already been solved by the burning of wood in a Danish power plant.
The bCharolais breed from Switzerland is one such beast – huge, they have good day meat ratio, and they’re the gentle giant pulling the plough in old images.
I have farmed here in NZ over all of this period. I concur with the graph. But some things need to be understood – the production increase is because with a lower stocking rate a lower percentage of the food goes into day to day maintenance of the animal’s liveweight and more into weight increase. But note that the stock numbers are already half way to zero – the production is not going to be sustained if we have a further decrease in numbers. And also note the contribution (by lowering stock numbers) NZ drystock farmers have already given to the environment. Funny how you don’t hear the acknowledgement of that. And as a side, while the powers that be continue to refuse to acknowledge the zeroing effect of the fact that methane decomposes then I continue to know that the methane argument is BS.
What was that great big British cow that seems to have been killed off by us horrible humans a few thousand years back. Jacinda needs to get them rebooted from DNA. And Kiwis need to stop voting for fools in government.
auroch.
But everyone is missing the bigger picture.
We need to breed smaller people. That way there would be less demand for everything (and the cows could stay the same size)… less leather for shoes, oil for clothing, we could make smaller airplanes, smaller cars, smaller houses with smaller doors, etc.
We need to start with little women; and then a PR program to encourage the importance small children; then declare a health emergency and hand out bumper stickers that say “no fat chicks”.
I suggest a brand new human breeding and then education program to reduce the number people fixated on bad science and mythological weather effects. This will solve the problem of believing in any negative outcomes from CO2. New Zealand is seriously in line for some sort of reeducation program. They’re getting loonier by the week.
No we are not loonier than the rest of the world. The problem is we are a small nation who’s wealth arises from exporting food to the rest of the world. We can not afford to compromise this production by taking a stand against what the rest of the world is doing.
I was responding to this heading. Any government or people who make or even believe such a statement are demonstrably “loonie”. Your comment to me is a non sequitur. Such a proposition [above] has absolutely no scientific foundation.
Well the heading wasn’t part of the document – it was Eric’s contribution. The document is about increasing per head productivity while decreasing the overall stock numbers. As the graph show – we have achieved this up to now. Given that we have halved our stock numbers it is unlikely for this to be a successful strategy from here on. But it was nothing to do about breeding larger stock as in genetics and so Eric’s headline is a little misleading.
“The Relationship Between Cow Size and Productivity” …
As you probably guessed already, nothing is as simple as some government employee wants to have you believe. The formula between feed, carcass weight and profitability is far more complex than you might assume.
https://www.beefmagazine.com/cow-calf/relationship-between-cow-size-production
The article was about New Zealand sheep and beef production. In NZ this production is almost exclusively from pasture. Each farm has a finite amount of pasture available and this quantity varies with the season. So our production criteria is based on stocking rate per acre with seasonal adjustment due to having less grass available in the winter. As you can see our production has stayed static despite going down in numbers. This is because as I said above a lower percentage of the food is required to maintain the animal so more can be put into production. One of the reasons we have dropped stock numbers is because we are placing less emphasis on wool which unfortunately appears to be a sunset industry. With wool production – very generally speaking – the more stock you can run per acre equals more wool production. If our wool production was included in this graph it would show a dramatic reduction.
I truly have no idea what you’re trying to get across. It’s another non sequitur. New Zealand, under its current leadership is a pathetic joke. Learn some science.
Wow – can’t beat that intellect!!
Can to ….
See my comment above
Ideally, breed one BIG cow, and cut bits off when necessary. In a PETA-approved way, of course…
I suppose such a cow would need to be bred in a zero-gravity state, in orbit. Perhaps we could keep herds of somewhat smaller ones on the Moon, where the requirement for spacesuits would make capturing the methane a comparatively simple business…
What if bigger cows don’t have just guns, but howitzers and flamethrowers as well?
guess Aus will corner markets in black n red angus then?
lol
The ranking, in decreasing importance, of greenhouse gases by their direct contribution to Earth’s overall greenhouse effect is: water – CO2 – methane (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas ).
It seems logical that one would want to tackle the two most important causes of “greenhouse gas warming” (assuming CO2’s effect is not already saturated; ref. Wijngaarden and Happer 2020 pre-print) before spending untold $billions on the third-place suspect.
But that’s just me.
Our main crop is grass which we convert to dairy products via a cow. A huge percentage of our national income is dairy and timber (pinus radiata).
Cattle for eating is a small part of our agriculture. The Please Eat Tasty Animals crowd don’t want any domesticated animals so larger, lower methane cows won’t help.
The bizarre thing is that (Professor) Rod Carr (EV?!) who has grown a beard to create green credentials, has said in his report that we should stop planting pinus radiata (35 years to 700mm dia and then carbon locked by being used for building long lasting products). He proposes in the alternative to plant more native trees. These take 5 times as long to grow, can’t be harvested and will eventually fall and rot releasing all their carbon as carbon dioxide. And this twisted logic is meant to reduce our ‘carbon emissions? A pure sop to greenies with a negative benefit to the carbon religion and a huge loss to a major export earner. (30 million cubic metres a year)
Apologies for the idiotic virtue signalling from newzild but be assured we have many sane people who are trying to (slowly) point out the ‘odd facts’ in the latest climate pronouncement like the promise that energy costs to households will be lower (than the 22 us cents per kWh I currently pay)!
I eat a near carnivore diet now. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. I dropped my BMI from 30 to 25 and my labs are great. Eat meat fat to lose weight and eat meat protein to build muscle.
Plants defend themselves by making toxins; animals don’t. Even microtoxins can cause major inflammation. And of course carbs cause insulin resistance, then metabolic syndrome, obesity and diabetes.
My favorite video, from a biochemistry point of view, explaining why carnivore is so much healthier than vegan and other plant diets. The title, Debunking the Carnivore Diet, is facetious. Given by an MD, author of a book called the Carnivore Code.