Carbon footprints of beef and dairy ‘really competitive’

Ireland’s dairy and beef sectors rank well on carbon footprinting when compared against international competitors, according to Laurence Shalloo, the head of animal and grassland research at Teagasc.

“Can we say that we are the lowest in the world? Probably not. But we can say we are in a really competitive place in terms of both dairy and beef production systems,” Shalloo said at a Teagasc sustainability conference on Tuesday.

Shalloo cautioned attendees over sourcing carbon footprint metrics from studies based on 20-year-old data which show Irish dairy as having the lowest footprint internationally and Irish beef as not being far behind.

A study published just this year that classified 72 commercial farms around western Europe as either grazing-based, confined or a mix of both systems should instead be used for more recent footprinting figures, he said.

Cost curve

The head of Teagasc’s climate centre Karl Richards gave attendees an overview of the expected impact of the measures contained in the marginal abatement cost curve (MACC), which could see the carbon footprint of both dairy and beef cut “substantially by close to 20%, 25%” if taken up by farmers.

The sector’s 25% emissions reduction target by 2030 could be met if there is significant uptake of farm diversification measures which reduce livestock numbers, Richards said. The researcher was able to give attendees a “little bit of good news” on ammonia emissions, with agriculture accounting for 99% of these emissions nationally.

A separate MACC has been compiled by Teagasc for ammonia, which is an air pollutant impacting air quality, the environment and human health.

Progress on ammonia has been made over recent years driven by farmer uptake of protected urea over regular urea and the use of low-emission slurry spreading.

“Up until last year, we were in breach of our ammonia targets for the country…what is projected is that based on the adoption of the MACC measures that we have, we will come into compliance probably this year and continue to go below that target for 2030.”