Will your Sunday roast really be carbon neutral by 2030?

A CSIRO report claims Australia’s red meat industry will miss its much-publicised target to be carbon neutral by 2030.

But Meat and Livestock Australia managing director Jason Strong said the industry was only missing its mark by 10 per cent and better take-up of new abatement programs would help it over the line.

“Short, not massively, but it’s short,” Mr Strong said.

“There’s kind of no point setting an ambitious target and then spending your time being concerned about whether you hit it or not.”

He said industry still had seven years to go and had planned how it would get there.

The red meat industry decided in 2017 to set a target that would create a key point of difference for Australian beef, lamb and goat in a competitive global protein market.

The CSIRO report, calculating emissions from 1990 to 2020, showed the industry’s footprint would grow by 12.2 megatonnes of CO2, equivalent to 63.5 megatonnes in 2030.

Mr Strong expected better uptake in strategies such as feed additives, forage crops, breeding for lower methane emissions, and improved herd and flock management would close the gap.

“The most important thing about them is that they’ve demonstrated by feeding a supplement to a ruminant, you can reduce the methane being produced by up to 90 per cent,” he said.

“We didn’t know that five or 10 years ago.

“I’m pretty confident that our research community working with the commercial sector is going to come up with a delivery mechanism to get those supplements out to animals that are eating grass in a paddock.”

He said the industry was “good at solving problems”.

International advantage

Mr Strong said the ambitious target gave Australian producers an edge, especially when negotiating the likes of the European Union Free Trade Agreement.

“Being able to demonstrate our credentials [is] really important,” he said.

“So it removes the opportunity for anybody, regardless of whether that be a trade negotiation or otherwise, to say we’re not doing anything in this space.

“We are actually being more ambitious than anybody else, and we’re demonstrating progress.”

The industry is also using other natural sequestration assets in its calculations to achieving carbon neutrality, including trees on farm, soil carbon storage, and savannah burning management.

“It’s more not having adequate, sufficient solutions to reduce the total amount of emissions being produced or the ability to actually capture those emissions,” he said.

“While livestock numbers are a big part of the discussion, and when we do any calculation around the contribution to the national inventory numbers are important, but none of the work that we’re doing is related to livestock numbers.

“We have to be able to increase the size of the herd and flock and be profitable and productive at the same time as managing our emissions and interaction with the environment.”