I’ve run sheep my whole life. Livestock farmers like me have a stake in Australia’s methane challenge we can’t afford to ignore, and we need to get our heads around it — fast.

This week researchers and producers gather at CSIRO’s Black Mountain campus for FRAME — the Forum for Reducing Australia’s Methane Emissions. That’s where this conversation gets real.

When it comes to Australia’s climate response and our obligations to reduce methane, we have a choice of three paths. We can lean in, we can do nothing or we can stake our future on offsets. The choice is ours, but as the old adage goes, if we’re not at the table – we’re on the menu.

Let’s start with some facts. Australia has a methane problem. We’re not alone — most countries that produce fossil fuels or livestock face the same issue. We just happen to do both. We’re a global signatory to the voluntary Global Methane Pledge, and are committed to reducing our methane emissions 30% by 2030. Denying the reality of this challenge doesn’t help. Livestock producers are right in the middle of the conversation whether we like it or not.

Methane is a potent gas, but it’s short-lived: stop the flow and the warming it causes drops away within twenty years. That makes it a real lever for bringing down emissions.

Australia’s cattle and sheep belch out around 2.4 million tonnes of methane a year, and that number hasn’t budged since 2005. It goes up and down with drought and rebuilding — not with policy. That’s our problem to grip.

Path one; we lean in. As a first step, we need to accurately report and rapidly limit our methane emissions from coal and gas. The rest of the economy has to get off fossil fuels, and do it fast to create room for essential sectors like agriculture to bring down our own emissions.

Then we need to look in our own paddock — and simply view emission reduction as the next frontier in efficiency. Every kilogram belched out in methane is a kilogram not effectively converted into profitability. It’s in our own best interests to bring those emissions down.

In 2017 the red meat sector set a target of being carbon neutral by 2030. As an industry, we’ve invested and learnt a whole lot along the way. Our best option now is to lean in, and consistently back the research that actually lets farmers cut methane; including feed additives like asparagopsis and 3-NOP.

Having made significant investments and gains in reducing our own emissions, the ag sector has every right to be front and centre in leading the charge for a reduction in methane emissions from coal and gas.

The second path is to do nothing and let the climate run the show. This isn’t really a choice — it’s a surrender. ABARES modelling shows broadacre farm profits could fall by up to 50 per cent by 2050 under high warming scenarios. Heat stress hits conception rates and weight gain. The 2018–19 drought alone cut the national sheep flock to its smallest since 1905. Carry on like this and the destocking still happens — it just happens the worst possible way: unplanned, with no support, and a lot of good farmers going to the wall. The climate is an uninvited destocker, and doing nothing hands it the keys.

The third path looks like action but isn’t: offsetting. It’s tempting to plant some trees, bank the carbon, and say the methane is handled. But methane is a flow and stored carbon is a stock, and while we can argue about CO2 equivalencies — they’re not the same thing, and swapping one for the other doesn’t stop the warming. Trees plateau. Soil carbon fills up. A bushfire can undo decades of it in an afternoon. Carbon sequestration and carbon farming is absolutely worth doing for its own sake — shade, biodiversity, cleaner water, extra income — but dressing it up as a methane fix is kidding ourselves. Our trading partners and the buyers of our beef and lamb are already onto it. A strategy built on pretending won’t survive the market, let alone the atmosphere.

The science isn’t saying livestock farming has no future. It’s saying the future depends on which path we pick — now. The farmers who get this — who know the difference between emissions intensity and absolute emissions, between offsetting and actually reducing, between an orderly transition and a wreck — will be the ones shaping what happens instead of wearing it.

That’s what’s on the table at Black Mountain. Pull up a chair.

Peter Holding is a livestock and cropping farmer from Harden, founding chair of Harden-Murrumburrah Landcare, and FCA board director.

Fact sources:

• ABARES modelling on farm profits (2-50% decline by 2050): https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/insights/climate-change-impacts-and-adaptation
• ABS sheep flock data: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/australias-sheep-flock-falls-lowest-level-1905
• Climate Council methane data (~4Mt total Australia, ~half from agriculture): https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/australias-methane-challenge-fossil-fuels-agriculture-waste/
• Global Methane Pledge (Australia signed Oct 2022, voluntary, 30% by 2030 from 2020 levels): https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/media-releases/australia-joins-global-methane-pledge