Greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced from the main livestock types by 23% and ammonia emissions by 15% if widescale and effective mitigations are adopted across UK farms, according to the Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock (CIEL).
The organisation’s new report, ‘Net Zero & Livestock: How Farmers Can Reduce Emissions’, models and collates data at scale across a range of mitigating scenarios in real life case studies across dairy, beef, sheep, pig and poultry farms.
It recommends that mitigation methods to reduce carbon footprints and meet the industry’s goal of net zero by 2050 should start with focusing on production efficiency.
“Increasing productivity per animal while reducing input costs and maintaining overall productivity at the same level is something we can do right now,” said Dr Mark Young, head of innovation at CIEL. “Farmers can focus on aspects such as age at which females first breed and their productive lifespan; number of offspring produced and their growth rate; and rate of milk or egg production.”
The report also suggests that using home-grown ingredients for feed with no land use change “should be optimum” for mitigation when it comes to climate change.
Work by CIEL is also going on to bring technological innovations, such as methane inhibitors, to market and develop delivery mechanisms less dependent on concentrate feeding. “Farmers cannot, and should not, be expected to deliver this on their own,” said Lyndsay Chapman, CIEL CEO.
The new report reconfirmed “that we could deliver a large reduction in greenhouse gases to significantly contribute to the goal of net zero carbon by 2050, but even that requires universal adoption of the various known mitigations across all livestock farms in the UK – something we are not currently achieving”, she added.
It comes as Finnish dairy supplier Valio this week announced a feed additive pilot to cut methane emissions from its cows by 30%.
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