Mr. Paul Price:

By all means, we should look at technology and explore opportunities but we should avoid misplaced optimism that they will work out. Unfortunately, we have seen emissions rise. The idea of having technology is that maybe we could produce more milk with less emissions than we did in 2011. If one wants to increase the amount of milk production and emissions keep going down, as they were from 1998 to 2011, that is fine. Knock yourself out. However, that is not what has happened. Instead, emissions have gone up, especially emissions of methane, which is a very serious and potent greenhouse gas, and nitrous oxide. The trouble with technologies that have been talked about, such as urea swapping and protected urea instead of calcium ammonium nitrate, CAN, is that if we use more urea, we will get more ammonia emissions. That will happen in these circumstances unless we take straight urea out of the market, which will not happen. It is supposed to be out of here by 2023. There is supposed to be a ban on straight urea use. That is in the climate action plan. That is what is supposed to happen with regard to ammonia. Well, that is not happening either.

It is very dangerous to say that we can avail of a certain technology or a certain opportunity if that discussion stops us or distracts us from cutting emissions now. We should be cutting emissions every year in every sector. We need to limit the highest GHG activities, because that is what we are about. We are in a situation where we do not have time to develop more research, more metrics or whatever. We need to act right now. We needed to act in 2010 to keep going the way we were. Sustainability may be about maintaining an activity or changing the activity to make sure we have less emissions. We have done the reverse, unfortunately, and that is pretty tragic. That is not the fault of farmers. Farmers are responding to the policy and market that was set up by all those policy decisions that, for example, led to the removal of the milk quota.

That is the level we must look at. We certainly should not be looking at farmers as the problem.

Carbon farming is yet another scheme we have had for a long time now, with much hand waving, and it has generally been a disaster around the world. There are financial operations trying to steer things in the wrong way. We have had carbon markets failing in guaranteeing credits. There is no way to really have good measuring, reporting and verification, which is a serious problem. One must guarantee additionality and that carbon is not being lost. If public money is to be put towards an investment that really is not guaranteed, we should be very careful about doing it. We have seen carbon markets really collapsing or being played and gamed in all sorts of ways. It is particularly the case with small farmers in the US and Australia that when the carbon markets collapse, there is a huge problem especially for those smaller farmers.

With carbon farming, a really good farmer may have great hedgerows in place and grass carbon in the soil, so if the carbon markets only pay for additional carbon savings, it is the people who have done the worst farming who will be paid. They will have carbon-depleted soils, for example, so why should they be paid? We must be careful about whom we reward and why. It is a very poor policy to connect soil quality to climate policy. It basically confuses and undermines the accuracy of carbon accounting and it also produces really perverse outcomes in soil management. Good farmers make sure there is more carbon in their soil and guarantee themselves good soil for a resilient future.