Revision of beef and sheep calculators

Summary

The red meat industry has set a goal to become carbon neutral by 2030 (CN30) to meet consumer and community expectations, ensure market access in the future and utilise technologies that deliver economic, environmental and social benefits.

This project updated the existing sheep and beef Greenhouse Accounting Framework tools (S-GAF and B-GAF, respectively) to make them more user friendly and to deliver more relevant outputs.

The two calculators were combined into one tool (SB-GAF), allowing mixed enterprises to generate one set of values for their farm. The improvements allow for improved accuracy when generating carbon accounts and simplify the process for producers.

Objectives

The objective of this project is to update the existing sheep and beef Greenhouse Accounting Framework tool (S-GAF and B-GAF, respectively) to make them more user friendly, ensure relevant outputs and align with the MLA Minimum Standards for Carbon Accounting and Carbon Footprints for Sheep and Beef Farms.

Key findings

• The improvements made to B-GAF and S-GAF allow for improved accuracy when generating carbon accounts and simplify the process for producers.
• The S-GAF and B-GAF tools were combined into the one SB-GAF tool, which has simplified the data input process for producers and will encourage more producers to generate a baseline carbon account for their farm, which is a prerequisite for identifying areas of improvement and strategies to reduce GHG emissions.
• Notable improvements include the SB-GAF data summary page, which provides a breakdown of emission sources for both beef and sheep, and provides net farm emissions.

Benefits to industry

The modifications to the emissions calculators will allow for improved accuracy in baseline carbon accounts for beef and sheep farms.

MLA action

The new SB-GAF tool will be made available to beef and sheep producers in conjunction with the Carbon Accounting Training Manual, to assist in the generation of accurate farm carbon accounts.

Future research

Future updates of the SB-GAF could include an input section for cattle and sheep on agistment, with scope to provide more expansive lists of purchased farm inputs.

There are also new components in near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) (e.g. emissions from farm dams) that need to be assessed.

A system could be integrated into the tool to flag user input errors and a much wider range of values for purchased livestock from different regions would be beneficial, seeing this is known to vary substantially across the country.