You’re being asked to care about emissions. Here’s the part nobody says out loud: chase it the wrong way and it’ll send you broke. Chase it the right way and you’ve already done the work.

You’re getting the sustainability talk now, from the processor, the bank, somewhere up the supply chain.

For a lot of producers it lands as one more worry that doesn’t pay, in language that came from a city office rather than a paddock.

If you’re cynical about it, you’ve earned the right to be.

So let’s not start with the talk. Let’s start with the plain truth, and then I’ll show you why your cynicism and a real opportunity sit comfortably side by side.

Here’s the plain truth.

In most markets today, an emissions figure on its own carries no price. Nobody pays you a premium for a kilogram of methane you didn’t make.

So no, you shouldn’t be chasing an emissions number the market won’t reward.

And here’s the part that matters most, because it can cost a producer real money if he gets it backwards. Not every way of cutting emissions is the same thing, and one of them will quietly send you broke.

Chase the lowest total emissions and you’ll end up with the wrong cattle. The animal that gives off the least, full stop, is usually the small, slow, unproductive one that isn’t doing much of anything, and a mob full of those doesn’t pay.

You’d cut your emissions and your income in the one move.

The number that actually matters

The number that actually matters was never how much gas an animal makes in total.

It’s how much it makes for every kilogram of beef it produces.

A good cow might give off plenty in a day, but if she’s weaning a big calf off little feed, then per kilogram, the only measure that counts, she’s among the cleanest and most profitable animals you own. So let’s be precise about a word that gets thrown around loosely. When this column says efficiency, it does not mean less production. It means more of it, for the same feed or less. Output for what goes in.

Once you see it that way, the supposed fight between profit and footprint simply disappears, because the efficient animal and the low-footprint animal turn out to be the very same cow. The one that converts her feed most completely into saleable weight is the one wasting the least of it as gas, getting nothing done. Select hard for the things that already make you money: feed conversion, growth, fertility, doing ability. The lighter footprint per kilogram comes along for the ride, whether you were aiming at it or not.

And this isn’t theory. Breeding and feeding programs that chased productivity for years, never once aiming at emissions, went back and looked, and found their footprint per kilogram had quietly fallen anyway. It’s the same conclusion the big international agricultural research bodies keep reaching: the fastest and cheapest way to cut the emissions behind a kilogram of beef is to lift productivity and efficiency first. Different countries, different systems, the same answer every time. They chased profit. The footprint followed them home.

That’s why the order matters, and why it’s worth being blunt about it. Lead with profit and the footprint looks after itself. Run it the other way, chase the lowest emissions first, and you don’t just spend on something nobody’s paying for. You actively select for less productive cattle and watch your margin walk out the gate with them. Producers can smell that, which is exactly why the lecture gets people’s backs up. Put the profitable thing first and there’s nothing left to resent.

There’s one bonus worth pocketing, and it’s becoming less optional every year. When a buyer or a processor does ask you to show your environmental credentials, and more of them will, the producer who chased efficiency can answer with real, animal-by-animal numbers instead of a shrug. He did it by accident, while he was busy making money.

The producer who went chasing the credential head-on usually paid more for less, and has the thinner cattle and the thinner cheque to prove it. The proof ends up in the back pocket of the bloke who was never really chasing it.

So what does it actually ask of you? Less than the talk makes out. It asks you to do the oldest thing in the book, harder and with better eyes. Keep the cattle that do the most with the least, breed from them, and move the rest on.

The cow that holds her condition through a dry season, the bull whose calves finish on less feed, the heifer you kept because the figures backed her and not just the look of her. That’s the whole program. The sustainability story is just those same animals, described in someone else’s language.

Do the profitable thing first, and do it well.

The rest takes care of itself, and it has done a good deal longer than anyone’s been giving the sustainability talk.

Collin Kramer is from C-Lock Inc, a precision technology company that provides agricultural technology that measures ruminant emissions and tracks individual livestock performance.