Owen Jennings: Farmers are mired in deep confusion and muddled policy

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with chief press secretary Andrew Campbell at the Kaiwaiwai Dairies farm near Featherston. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION

Farmers are angry and confused. When big guns lined them up for their greenhouse gas emissions, blaming them for half of New Zealand's problems, farmers became concerned.

The Government, Government departments, scientists, researchers, commentators, lobby groups and the media weighed in with the storyline that 48 per cent of the nation's emissions come from down on the farm.

However, that eminent authority on all things climate, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently stated New Zealand's constant methane emissions are overstated by a factor of 3 or 4. Prominent New Zealand scientist, Professor Dave Frame agrees and argues convincingly for a more accurate measurement.

Farmers want to know who is right.

Are they faced with dealing with emissions that are 28 per cent of our total or just a quarter of that - 7 per cent?

For farmers, the numbers matter massively. They produced 1.2 million tonnes of methane from their livestock in 2021.

Using an $85 carbon price, that is either $2.8 billion in value or $700 million, depending on your choice of the NZ Government and its agencies or the IPCC and Professor Frame.
That staggering difference will look even more absurd if the carbon price goes over $200 as demanded by many lobbyists.

But that is only one confusion.

Farming leaders fought to design their own scheme to reduce ruminant methane emissions. He Waka Eke Noa was formed. It produced a cumbersome, expensive answer that most farmers have rejected.

The Climate Change Commission agreed with dissenting farmers and disputed the HWEN proposal. They also agreed that putting farmers into the ETS would be unwise. (See Commission's response at the end of this column).

That's despite the Government, past and present, and every other climate change enthusiast demanding farmers be put in the ETS.

Farmers are still waiting in a vacuum. They have no idea where the latest proposal will end. They are uncertain where a National/ACT government would take them.

Meanwhile, a growing number of international scientists are doing new research work that shows methane is only able to impact on temperatures in a trivial manner – too small to be effectively measured - and doubling methane would have no further effect. These are not fringe scientists.

Farmers want to know why this more recent research is ignored and not countered. "If these new findings are wrong tell us where and how".

It is not pleasant being told you have to cut back production by 50 per cent as the extremists are demanding; even the 20-30 per cent the Government is blithely proposing.

Rural New Zealand carried the country through the Covid crisis and is now being dumped to chase fractions of a degree of warming and international acclaim to be "first".

Farmers can read the Paris Agreement that clearly states countries should not take measures that impact on the world's ability to feed people.

We are the biggest per capita food producers and the most environmentally and economically efficient. Slashing our production means someone else with a bigger carbon footprint will take up the slack.

That seems confusing, to be polite.

Owen Jennings. Photo / Supplied

Farmers also know they haven't increased their methane emissions over the last 20 years.

In fact, they are down marginally. That logically means there is no new warming, even slight cooling as the "cloud" of ruminant methane diminishes. Net zero has been achieved. Fonterra has just announced its farmers have reduced methane emissions by 11 per cent since 2017. That is significant progress in a major sector.

Did farmers get credit? No, not a word. What do you really want, New Zealand?

Two of the biggest and most successful sheep and beef farms in Gisborne have been purchased by overseas interests and are being planted in trees. Just two, of many. The owners are receiving massive subsidies to enable carbon to be sequestered reducing CO2 damage.

Farmers are perplexed. You want to penalise us for our emissions when we are reducing them. Then you pay overseas interests handsomely to make money out of forestry using some of our best-producing land to offset a sector increasing their emissions.

More confusion.

Well-recognised rural commentators like Professor Keith Woodford claim sheep and beef farms, one of our biggest earners, cannot compete against carbon farming and will largely disappear under this confusing regime. At $200 a tonne for carbon dairy farming will disappear too.

That will decimate rural communities.

Farmers ask, "Is that what Kiwis want?"

As for horticulture replacing sheep and beef farming as bureaucrats suggest, farmers can only wonder at such idiocy.

Farmers' instincts have told them something is badly wrong. Despite being under severe pressure from a raft of other ill-considered regulations and running ragged managing their day-to-day operations, they are prepared to do what is right and responsible.

What they find is dangerous thinking, muddled policy, hurtful claims and deeply disturbing confusion.

• Owen Jennings is a former national president of Federated Farmers.

* The Climate Change Commission advises it is inaccurate for this column to state that it agrees with dissenting farmers and disputed the HWEN proposal:

"There are many points the Commission and HWEN agreed on, including the need for farm-level emissions pricing," a spokesman said.

"The Commission said that the He Waka Eke Noa proposal could provide a useful starting point for implementing a basic farm-level agricultural emissions pricing system by 1 January 2025, but that several critical changes would be needed.

"The changes needed include a system for crediting carbon sequestration by vegetation that would separate to the one used for pricing emissions and for pricing emissions for synthetic nitrogen at processor level, rather than as part of farm level pricing."