Federated Farmers' Mid Canterbury president David Clark believes the agricultural sector is one of the most efficient producers of food from a carbon point of view. Photo / Supplied - Federated Farmers
By Adam Burns, Local Democracy Reporter.
Federated Farmers say a positive decline in methane emissions painted a better picture around dairy farming's carbon footprint.
But Federated Farmers' Mid Canterbury president David Clark said there was a disparity in the figures, highlighting Ministry for Environment's numbers which showed a 0.4 per cent decrease.
"Stats NZ have changed what they include as dairy farming statistics but it's also not capturing changes in land use with emissions out of sheep and beef going down," he said.
"It's just the different ways of looking at emissions out of dairy farming."
Nationwide methane emissions from all sources have fallen 4.7 per cent since 2006 which Clark said was significant.