In a note to supporters, Federated Farmers Meat and Wool chair and national board member Toby Williams said the group won’t back down over what it calls “methane madness”.

Last week, as reported by Carbon News, a survey by farming groups claimed that 95% of farmers opposed the government’s current methane strategy.

Unlike the farming groups quoted last week, Williams didn’t go as far as criticising the government investing hundreds of million in potential biotech solutions to reduce ruminant methane.

But Williams wrote that climate change is a hot topic in rural New Zealand. “It’s safe to say Federated Farmers have significant concerns about the Government’s current direction of travel.”

Methane review

The government is currently considering the findings of an independent review on biogenic methane science and targets, which showed that New Zealand’s methane emissions reductions, consistent with “no additional warming,” could vary between 0% and 24% depending on greenhouse gas emissions in the rest of the world.

New Zealand takes a “split gas approach” to climate targets, with methane from agriculture - which accounts for about half of the country’s emissions - treated separately because of its different warming impact. The 2050 target aims to reduce net emissions of all greenhouse gases to zero by 2050, except for biogenic methane. The country currently has a target of reducing biogenic methane emissions by 10% by 2030, relative to 2017 levels, and 24 to 47% lower by 2050.

So the methane review panel’s recommendations could result in a significant weakening of the target.

The agricultural sector lobbied hard ahead of the last election for a review of the targets consistent with “no additional warming”.

But the review was highly controversial, with the Climate Change Commission rejecting the basis for the review of the targets and warning that changes could lead to higher emissions and increased warming.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment also criticised the review as a waste of money and warned the government’s proposed approach could lock in a higher level of agricultural emissions as “a right” indefinitely.

The government has continued to take a ‘more-carrot-than-stick’ approach to climate action for the powerful agricultural sector, removing agriculture from the Emissions Trading Scheme last year and delaying planned agricultural emissions pricing until 2030, all while spending hundreds millions of dollars on hoped-for biotech fixes for methane emissions from livestock.

Policy settings 'broken'

Despite this, Federated Farmers’ Williams says that current policy settings are “badly broken”.

“They’re undermining farmers’ profitability and threatening the viability of our rural communities.

“They’re also the root cause of a whole heap of other challenges farmers are struggling with, from out-of-control pest numbers through to the continued planting of productive land in pines.”

“The government are currently in the process of considering changes to methane targets, but there is a very real risk we could still end up being asked to make an unrealistic 24% reduction by 2050.”

The government’s belief that farmers are already ‘on track’ for this level of reduction is based on increased forestry and wishful thinking about the arrival of new technologies, Williams says.

“To date, most of our emissions reductions have been driven by one thing and one thing only – shutting down farms and putting them into pine trees.

“Since 2007, when the ETS was first introduced, our national flock has fallen by almost 40%. We’re losing almost a million sheep a year.

“In the last seven years alone, we’ve lost over 260,000 hectares of productive farmland to pine trees – is that really the future we want for our country?”

Williams wanted to make it clear to members that Federated Farmers will never accept a 24% methane reduction target. “We will be standing firm on this issue.”

He said rural MPs should be sitting up and taking notice. “Farmers are not happy with where things are heading.”

'Death sentence'

Williams also told Farmers’ Weekly that the government’s underlying assumptions in setting a 24% reduction target for biogenic methane were wrong. “They’re talking about holding the world to 1.5 Centigrade of warming, where common knowledge now seems to be that we’re going to be at least at 2 if not greater than that. And the higher that is going to be, the less actually, that New Zealand farmers should be having to do.”

“They’re also assuming that they are going to plant 31,000 ha of farmland every year between now and 2050. That’s 750,000 ha of farmland which currently isn’t in forest going into forest.

“These are just wild assumptions that have devastating effects on our rural communities.”

He said the target would be “a death sentence” for the sheep and beef sector.

With Federated Farmers’ AGM coming up at the end of June, Williams said climate policy would be on the agenda. “Provinces are bringing forward remits around methane reduction targets - and whether we should have one, even. They’re also bringing forward discussion items and remits around should we be advocating for New Zealand to be part of the Paris Accord still. And we are driven by our members. If these remits are passed through Federated Farmers they become Federated Farmers policy and that’s the angle we will take with the government.

Williams said Federated Farmers was prepared to go to battle with the government.