AS THE beef industry moves closer to regulated emissions reporting, there are calls for upgrades to the tool most commonly used to measure carbon footprints.
In recent years, banks, processors and other supply chains have been pushing producers to measure their “baseline” emissions using the SB GAF (Sheep & Beef Greenhouse Accounting Framework) tool – a publicly available carbon calculator created by the University of Melbourne that is used by Meat & Livestock Australia, Agricultural Innovation Australia and private companies like Ruminati.
While the emissions reporting has been voluntary at this stage, it last year took a step closer to becoming a regulatory requirement for most cattle producers – with new laws making processors, banks, bigger producers and other supply chains report the emissions of all the companies they deal with.
But according to Russell Pastoral Operations managing director Adam Armstrong – who also has positions on AgForce and Cattle Australia – improvements need to be made to GAF.
After the company took part in a carbon baselining program through its bank, Mr Armstrong decided to take a deep dive into the different carbon calculators to more accurately measure the operation’s emissions and see what improvements need to be made.
Beef Central recently caught up with him in his office in Brisbane to run through the different calculators and some of the areas that he believes need improvement.
A move away from a state-by-state approach
The GAF tool has taken the internationally recognised United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calculator and put it into an Australian setting on a state-by-state basis.
While the Government’s intentions with the legislation is relatively unclear, Mr Armstrong said if it was to inform decisions about reducing emissions at a farm level, the calculator needed to better reflect the complexities of cattle businesses.
He said a state-by-state approach was a very blunt way of estimating elements like pasture nutrition.
“If I’m in New South Wales and I’m in winter, they’re saying you’ve got six percent crude protein, irrespective of whether you’re in Broken Hill, in the New England, or the Southern Highlands,” he said.
“In Victoria, where we have those highly improved systems, they’re saying your crude protein levels are 20pc. Now, many producers in New England and Southern Highlands are going to be far closer to that Victorian model than Broken Hill, as is any producer grazing cattle on an oats fodder crop.”
Mr Armstrong said the crude protein levels were not being adjusted when fertiliser was applied.
“It asks me to put my fertilizer in which is about building a nitrous oxide footprtint, but it doesn’t recognise the reason you put fertiliser on is to lift the nutrient quality of your pasture (which would lower your footprint),” he said.
The excel version of the GAF tool does give users the ability to manually adjust crude protein levels, however they have to go and find out what they are. Some commercial versions do not allow for the adjustment.
Still an honesty system
The cattle management part of the tool asks for information about livestock numbers (bulls, steers, cows and heifers), liveweights and weight gains. For breeders it asks a series of questions about calving rates.
One of the original pilot programs Russell Pastoral participated in was on its Blackall property, Champion Station, which was backgrounding about 2000 head.
Mr Armstrong said the company used subjective assessments on weights, which ultimately resulted in a 51kg overestimation of weights, which overestimated feed consumption and ultimately overestimated methane emissions.
“We’ve had to build a complex tool to model our herd-flow to be able to have accurate weight data to put into the GAF tool. So straight away, that’s a major issue that there’s no integrity in the weights and their progressional weights that’s going into this tool.
“If you’ve got systems like us, you can actually do that accurately, but I could also just artificially deflate my numbers, I could say my cattle are 200kg when they’re 400kg.”
Painting the whole picture
While the GAF tool has some provisions for carbon sequestration through planted trees on farm, Mr Armstrong said he would like to see modelling for carbon sequestration in soil.
Russell Pastoral is currently looking into starting soil carbon projects, which he said would show significant amounts of carbon going back into the farm.
“At a minimum, we need a net number being spat at the bottom,” he said.
“Ultimately, I would like to be able to say, ‘if I’m positive on carbon positive pay me out’.”
More alignment of calculators
As more and more producers have been using the GAF tool and updates have been made, Mr Armstrong has found that some providers have not been keeping up with the updates.
“We were literally trailing all the tools side by side in this office and getting different results being spat out of the end,” he said.
“As we reverse engineered it, we found out that was due to the fact that it depended which version of the GAF the provider’s platform supported.
“There appears to be better alignment now between the calculators we have used but it is highly concerning that there can be any variation at all.”
More industry support needed
Mr Armstrong said a clear and transparent process needed to be put in place for updates to the GAF tool, supported by industry and informed by research.
The Government has been tight lipped on how it plans to collect the carbon footprint of producers, except to say that it should not come at undue cost. It is working on developing voluntary emissions estimation standards, with GAF viewed as the authoritative source in the meantime.
Mr Armstrong said while it is already legislated, industry support was needed influence the future process.
“At the beginning of this journey I was critical of GAF and its design, I have now come full circle and realised it’s about leaning-in and improving the model to make it more fit for purpose,” he said.
“Conversations with other agricultural sectors including sugar and grains indicate the issues identified with livestock calculators apply to those sectors as well.
“As a mixed farmer, it makes sense to me that the RDCs work together on the science to address these issues and support the improvements needed.
“My view is that GAF should be a central point of truth, as long as it as accurate as it can be, then the commercial guys can build all the bells and whistles they like on top.”
I suspect GAF does not accurately assess carbon sequestration associated with reforestation. When reforestation sequestration is calculated using CSIRO’s LOOC-C calculator the amount is based on each properties rainfall and soil type using GIS for identifying the area being planted. It seems SB-GAF uses large geographical areas of each state which do not identify soil type and rainfall for particular properties. It gives the same reforestation abatement for an identified region on its calculator irrespective of rainfall. For my region that rainfall varies from 700+ average annual rainfall to 450mm average rainfall, that makes an enormous impact on tree species to plant and their annual carbon abatement over 25 years versus a farm’s total emissions. SB-GAF calculated annual abatement at 2.9tCO2e/ha while LOOC-C calculated it at 19.4tCO2e/ha. Using SB-GAF our farm which has 23% of its pasture area devoted to reforestation since 2005 is a net greenhouse gas emitter, using LOOC-C the farm is a net carbon sink. The LOOC-C result is in line with University of Melbourne published research for a prime lamb enterprise by Doran Brown et al 2016. I alerted Agriculture Victoria staff presenting emissions reductions workshops and asked for an explanation but received no reply.
Sounds like another cost we don’t need through the climate change hoax!
The current “reporting system”
Is flawed and totally biased
This is not complicated
You cannot count every farm input in growing grass, but not recognise pasture in removing co2 from the atmosphere !
Cows cannot “”emit methane” if they haven’t eaten grass first ( and carbon removed from the atmosphere )
They are not “adding to greenhouse gases” they are part of a natural cycle – which scientists like Walter Jehne and others point out has many benefits
I just cannot believe the current “reporting” is accepted by anyone in our industry
Gaff, gaffe, and GAF
The Macquarie Dictionary provides common use meanings for the first two, including-
gaff meaning nonsense, humbug, and
gaffe meaning a social blunder.
Can’t wait to see the meaning given to GAF, once the fog of ideology clears, and common sense returns to rural industries.
My understanding is that there is capacity to do this with AIA following the technical governance model.
The call out message is that this work needs to be funded.
Well done Adam for raising all of these issues. The GAF tool has always been far too oversimplified from its inception and is well overdue for some of these upgrades you mention. Particularly given it is touted as THE tool to measure emissions.
Thankyou for your article.
I know so many people who have come out of a Carbon Calculator workshop scratching their heads and feeling betrayed.
The GAF methodology is inherently flawed and it’s sending dangerous market signals. How can trees be calculated as sequesters of carbon and pastures not? I’ve nothing against trees but in a country so slim on viable agricultural land a macro-economic oversight should maintain a balance to ensure long-term food security.
The greatest news is that well managed grazing systems can kill two birds with one stone by sequestering C02 while providing vital protein and nutrients to an increasingly undernourished and (too often), overfed consumer.
Totally agree Erica, the lack of any form or recognition of soil sequestration has always been a fundamental flaw. I had optimistically hoped it would be included in the newer AIA model, but that was foolish of me to think such common sense would be applied…
G’day Stuart, I have engaged heavily with AIA and also MLA as part of the process of pulling apart the GAF assumptions etc. Encouragingly, I have found both organisations to be receptive to addressing the problems we have identified.
Some of the issues raised, they were already aware of. However, there are two things that are needed to address these issues.
Firstly, the more complex ones require research to be done to provide the scientific backing to support fixes.
Secondly, if the science is there, time and effort is required to make the changes to both the GAF spreadsheets and the digital tools that rely on them.
I understand that as a not-for-profit, AIA relies on funding by a grouping of RDCs such as MLA, GRDC etc, and that 10 of the RDCs invested in the build of their Environmental Accounting Platform.
I’ve seen the results of AIA’s impact assessment which showed that the RDCs working together is around 11 times more cost effective than them doing it each on their own.
We are getting to the pointy end of mandated emission reporting requirements and the RDCs can’t take their foot off the gas.
Discussions with both AIA and MLA indicate a high level of interest in developing soil carbon calculators but again it comes back to the matter of industry finding the money to do the science needed to support it. Producers need to put more pressure on their respective RDCs to properly fund ongoing research and development of the science as well as funding of not only development of calculators but ongoing improvements as well.