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Major improvements in farmers’ manure management practises in recent years could result in changes to the calculation of agricultural gas emissions, Teagasc believes.
Since the last report on farm-level activity in 2003, there has been an increase in the amount of manure stored as slurry, stored under a roofed slatted tank, and spread by low-emission methods. These are all positive moves for agriculture’s emissions profile.
In the EPA’s most recent inventories, manure management accounts for 10% of agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 77% of ammonia emissions.
“The inventories, GHG and ammonia inventories, rely on activity data,” Teagasc economist Cathal Buckley, who helped compile a Teagasc report on the subject, told the Irish Farmers Journal.
“This report will hopefully replace those [2003] numbers and give a more up-to-date snapshot of what’s happening on farms.”
Buckley said the increase was due to significant farmer investment in storage facilities, driven by nitrates regulations and TAMS
Buckley believes the figures would likely lead to an improvement of agriculture’s emissions profile. Across almost all categories of housed cattle, a greater proportion of manure is stored as slurry, which releases fewer emissions than farmyard manure. Slurry storage under a roofed slatted tank has also increased from 71% to 87%, a practice which emits fewer emissions.
Buckley said the increase was due to significant farmer investment in storage facilities, driven by nitrates regulations and TAMS.
The volume of slurry spread by splash plate, the most emission-intensive method, has fallen from 98% in 2003 to 84%.
The use of low-emission slurry spreading (LESS) methods, such as trailing shoe and injection, has increased from 1% to 4%, while umbilical spreading now accounts for 10%.
Transition
“For farmers, and Ireland in general, to get credit for that transition away from splash plate toward LESS, we need to show evidence that farmers are making the transition and this report provides confirmation,” Buckley said.
He anticipated future reports would pick up larger-scale transition to low-emission spreading, with it becoming a compulsory requirement for nitrates derogation farmers from 2021.
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