The research into the capacity of the New Zealand pastoral sector to achieve agricultural emissions reduction through system change.

The necessity for the New Zealand agricultural sector to contribute to global emissions reduction is increasingly apparent. Outside of New Zealand’s international commitments, domestic legislation, or our customers’ requirements, it is in our farmers’ own interest that everyone can do what they can to slow, stop, and, ideally, reverse human impacts on the climate.

With methane emissions tightly linked to feed intakes and nitrous oxide emissions largely derived from the nitrogen cycle, most currently applicable emissions mitigations relate to farm management practices. The implementation of most mitigations also has a cost, normally by way of lowered profitability, to the farm system. Much of the recent research effort has focused on better understanding the drivers of the associated biological processes, finding ways to disrupt them to identify more cost-effective ways to mitigate them. There was therefore an opportunity to investigate the more disruptive impacts and transformational solutions associated with the New Zealand pastoral sector reducing its agricultural greenhouse gas (aGHG) emissions. As a result, the Ag Emissions Centre initiated and funded a Future Farm Systems Research Programme in 2022.

This body of research, completed over the past three years, supports the premise that change is indeed possible at farm level, but there are limitations and wider implications.