Managing carbon in livestock systems: modelling options for net carbon balance (UWA)

Summary

​In 2009/10, four national demonstration sites were commissioned by RELRP. The main aims of these sites were to demonstrate and communicate new research on options to mitigate methane emissions from ruminant livestock. Another aim of the network of sites was to establish limited baseline data to help demonstrate impacts of abatement measures to help with this communication and to gain the acceptance by leading farmers, advisors, and agribusiness consultants will be critical to adoption of new technologies or practices, to improve the chances of adoption of new technologies and maximising uptake of emissions abatement strategies.  One strategy that can help to support this goal is to demonstrate a number of mitigation or abatement options using modelling protocols that have taken their biophysical and economic inputs from actual farm sites. The four demonstration sites all have the capacity to provide the biophysical and economic inputs required to successfully model net carbon balance. Further, each of these sites may have the opportunity to develop scenarios to consider climate variability and abatement strategies. The intent of this project was to use MIDAS to model the UWA Future Farm (Pingelly) as one component of an overarching modelling report to identify key similarities/differences between different modelling approaches.  More specifically, our objective was to model whole farm emissions on a farm typical of WA's broadacre farming region.​