ONE of Australia’s largest cattle companies says regulatory uncertainty is holding the beef industry back from investing in projects that improve environmental sustainability.

Darryl Savage speaking at last week’s BeefEx event.

The North Australia Pastoral Co has been marketing carbon neutral beef for more than five years and has been running a comprehensive program to measure and monitor its impact on the environment.

Speaking at last week’s BeefEx conference in Brisbane, the company’s programs and innovation manager Dr Darryl Savage ran through some of the industry’s strengths, risks and threats.

Dr Savage said the company had been trying to invest in carbon projects in recent years, which had become difficult with Governments consistently cancelling and changing methodologies.

“We have been engaged in seven schemes now the generate Australian Carbon Credit Units and not a single scheme has remained intact,” he said.

“They have either been removed, changed, paused or delayed with no timeframe. For us this is really important because there is a case for investing in these projects, but the biggest killer to investment is uncertainty – I know that is not limited to us.”

Plenty to be optimistic about

Dr Savage said there was plenty for the industry to be optimistic about and the growing role of feedlots was a big part of that. He said the company’s feedlot on the Darling Downs played a major role in its efforts to reduce emissions.

“The feedlot industry exists because it is what our consumers wanted, that means we are producing every single day of the week, 365 days of the year, in a highly variable environment, he said.”

“We are simply the most efficient sector of our industry and it makes a material contribution to the carbon footprint of beef production in general. The fact that our animals spend their last couple of months of their life in a feedlot, actually reduces their footprint by about 15pc.”

Dr Savage said the same principal applied for protecting natural habitats.

“Our feedlot operations are key to us being able to manage the natural habitats in our pastoral operations. Essentially the feedlot industry is providing an opportunity to protect environment”

“The feedlot sector is the testing ground for innovation, most of the innovation that the livestock sector depends on is tested in the feedlot sector.”

Industry needs to work together on methane accounting

While NAPCo had been investing in reducing emissions, Dr Savage said the way livestock methane emissions are accounted for remained an issue for the industry.

The globally accepted methodology for reporting livestock emissions, represents methane as an equivalent to CO2 from fossil fuels. Many have been calling for international agencies to recognise the differences between the gases and focus targets on warming rather than numbers of emissions.

Dr Savage said the frameworks were oversimplified.

“The accounting frameworks are at odds with the science, enteric methane is not properly accounted for in any of the existing frameworks,” he said.

“The IPCC has arrived at calculations, they are logical and elegant in their simplicity. Unfortunately, they have been oversimplified and they don’t reflect the difference that enteric methane has on global warming the way other sources of emissions.

“I would guess that most producers have a net zero contribution to global warming. This is something as an industry – not just feedlots – need to work together on.”