3.4. Calculators

MATT WOODS: Hello. I'm Matt Woods, and I'm here with Professor Richard Eckard. Richard has been working for over twenty years on addressing the impacts of a changing climate on agriculture.

Can you briefly describe what a carbon calculator is?

PROFESSOR RICHARD ECKARD: So a carbon calculator is just -- in our case, we've got the greenhouse accounting framework calculator. So we've got one called the sheep and beef calculator, another one called the feedlot calculator; a dairy calculator.

And it's a simple spreadsheet.

It has all complex calculations behind the scenes that you can go and look at if you want to. There's nothing hidden there. But the data input page is one page where you just put in your animal numbers, how much fertiliser you've used, how much lime you used, and what energy you used, and what you bought onto the farm.

WOODS: Right.

ECKARD: And it breaks it down to a simple number at the end that says "this is how much methane is produced". "This is how much nitrous oxide is produced". "This is how much carbon dioxide you're losing".

And "this is how much total emissions your farm produces and emissions per unit product it produces".

At the end, those are the numbers that matter. And over time, that's what the supply chain will look at and say, what is your emissions intensity? How much methane are you producing?

And those are the numbers that matter.

WOODS: Terrific. Thank you very much Richard. I appreciate your time.

MATT WOODS: Hello. I'm Matt Woods, and I'm here with Professor Richard Eckard.

Richard's been working for over 20 years on addressing the impacts of a changing climate on agriculture.

WOODS: If that farmer wanted to monitor and measure their emissions, how would they start?

Where would they start to work out actually how much emissions they're producing?

PROFESSOR RICHARD ECKARD: So, there is some thought out there that farmers might need to measure emissions. That’ll never happen. It is too complex; it is too complicated from a science point of view to get accurate profiles on methane from animals in a farm setting - so that’s impractical.

However, the research we've done says that 20.7 times dry matter intake is a fairly reliable number. And we're starting to quantify all the mitigation strategies against that. So if you feed oils to your cows at seven percent, that 20.7 becomes 16. We know that. If you feed seaweed, it might become five.

So we know how to adjust calculations to accommodate it. The biggest uncertainty in knowing what your number is on a livestock farm is knowing how many animals you've got. That's actually far bigger than the methane conversion that we use.

WOODS: You'd think most farmers know their animal numbers, wouldn't you?

ECKARD: It is surprising, we do case studies across farms right from the Northern Territory right down to Tasmania, and getting animal numbers right is the biggest struggle we have in doing an accurate carbon audit on farms. Even though they have a stock book - because there's no such thing as static number of animals on a farm. A dairy farm will milk different number of animals every day of the year.

A beef system, a prime lamb system, lambs are being born, lambs are dying. So actually knowing exactly how many animals you've got on any one day, and locking that into a calculator is actually quite difficult.

Even some of the best farmers, we have to go back to them two or three times to say "did you mean culling before or after the weaning rate you quoted?"

Because it doesn't reconcile and you realise that; we had one case of a Queensland farmer that the numbers didn't add up when we said, you know, what was your weaning rate? What was your reproductive rate? How many animals are you producing? And it turns out that there were a thousand animals down the back of the farm that they lost for a couple of years. It gives you some perspective on some of the bigger properties in Australia where you can lose a thousand animals for a period of time. Not ultimately, but you can miss them in a muster that isn't perfect.

WOODS: So farmers won't be required to actually measure their emissions, but it's useful for them to start maybe calculating their emissions and carbon calculators is something that you've got a real history in, and were a first mover in. How do they work and what are the sort of inputs that farmers might need to put into them?

ECKARD: Correct. So at the moment, we've got fairly simple spreadsheet calculators. They are being coded up into online tools like Meat and Livestock Australia have a identical version of our sheep and beef calculator now online, and it will give you the same answer. We've made sure that the various calculators are not giving different answers.

The biggest input is animal numbers.

So if you're a sheep or beef producer somewhere in Australia, getting the animal numbers right into the calculator on a seasonal basis is probably the biggest input.

If you know your animal numbers, you can pretty much complete the calculator in ten minutes. We've tried to keep it as simple as possible. So that if you know the data that needs to go in, you can put it in in about ten minutes. The other inputs you need to know is fertiliser used. So if you're a dairy farmer, you might be using nitrogen fertiliser, you need to know how much you put on. Most dairy farmers know that.

And the other inputs is electricity and diesel consumption on the farm, and we just put that on an annual time step basis.

So emphasising again, they're simple spreadsheets, they have a single page of data input, and, we try to keep it down to about ten minutes to get in and out if you've got all the data required.