In amongst GourMay events, last month120,000 Livestock Producers descended on mass for Rockhampton’s Beef Australia. At home, for GourMay, K2 Organic Beef was showcased having over 70 people attend a regenerative farm walk where many aspects of organic food production in this region were addressed.
At both forums it was emphasized that the beef industry is more than just a food producer, it’s people actually manage most of Northern Australia’s biodiversity, remnant vegetation, soil, trees, animals, insects & microbes. Without ruminants cycling and moving nutrients through landscapes, there would be more fires, more oxidizing grasslands, less biodiversity and a similar level of emissions – without the food. This is because, when ungrazed pastures oxidise or break down, they release greenhouse gasses. We manage the animals, the animals manage the landscapes.
The rangelands of Northern Australia, by and large, are not cropping country. You can’t plough or spray them for plant-based food production- and if you did they’d be destroyed. Areas and distances are immense and the highest nutrient density food production, with the best environmental outcome option is ruminant livestock – namely cattle.
Holistic Management teaches how practically to re-engage the natural cycles that have existed from the interaction of plants and animals for millennia. How to embrace chaos. Renowned educator Brian Whelburg is in the Mary Valley over the next four months teaching the principles that saw the development of the most fertile lands in the world- using grazing animals. This is an opportunity not to be missed.
So what’s the other side of the argument? We all hear in mainstream media that cows are the bad guys right? 30 kg of CO2 equivalent to produce a kilogram of beef and umpteen thousand litres of water? Well actually no. As participants of the K2 Beef Farm Tour had explained, our farm’s “emissions” per liveweight KG of beef is closer to 10kg of CO2 eq* which seems to be pretty good. At a retail level, if you had to pay for that impact with your meal, it’d be under $1/kg of edible meat or 33c per steak. However- 93% of those “emissions” are attributed to Methane under common calculators – a short term gas that actually assists plants to photosynthesize**.
Water wise, actual water that is used up by an animal, not falling on the land on which it grazes (that would fall anyway) and not cycled back in urine & manure in a grassfed operation, our estimate is probably closer to 20l/kg of liveweight gain.
Carbon Calculators are a reductionist approach to a holistic problem. But here we find ourselves having to prove in a net carbon world we are “neutral” and only measuring half the equation.
Carbon is only one part of the story with the Clean Energy Regulator implementing the Nature Repair Bill this year which will see an Ecological Credit Market established alongside the Australian Carbon Exchange. Carbon accounting will be part of our lives within 4 years.***
The rules are being set now. The calculator algorithms are being honed and there are big gaps in assumptions (such as forgetting that green leaves contribute directly by converting CO2 to Oxygen via photosynthesis). This is the opportunity of a century for landholders to fix the problems Corporations have created and to make them pay for it. We can be recognised and monetised for doing the regenerative work we currently do for free. It can all be taken away, however, with one poorly researched assumption by an overzealous bureaucrat.
The next six months are critical in establishing what rules future generations will have to live under so don’t be afraid to speak up. Not to be a knocker, but to be part of the solution. A better planet where nutritious, healthy food production and ecological improvement happen simultaneously- they aren’t traded off.
*https://ruminati.com.au/
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwEToq05L2k
***https://cer.gov.au/markets/australian-carbon-exchange
