Carbon tunnel vision puts green advances at risk

COLUMN: From the Farm by Victoria Ballantyne

I recently completed a farm carbon audit. We have been doing these since 2014 and initially I bought in to this process, believing it would help us reduce our environmental impact. I am no longer convinced it will deliver this and as every farm in Scotland is likely to be required to do one in the coming years, I worry about the path this leads us down.

After much analysis I’ve concluded that the only ways to change our carbon report is to build a wind turbine, sell a large percentage of animals (where would this leave food security and availability?) or, ironically, start pumping our animals full of barley (the less time they are alive the less methane they emit). None of these options are better than what we do now.

I was speaking to a parent the other day who was annoyed that ‘Meat Free Mondays’ are being rolled out across schools. This doesn’t bother me – we all need to eat more vegetables. What does bother me is the message: ‘because it is better for the environment’. This mantra is inextricably believed by much of society, and especially by those who deliver policy, that if we stop eating meat the world will somehow repair itself.

The two biggest problems with this are with the way data and measurements are calculated and with the narrow focus on carbon. The more I speak with farmers and academics who have a really good grasp on this, the more I’m convinced of the flaws. These farmers are committed to improving biodiversity. They are not climate change deniers or unwilling to change.

Our report does not include any of the carbon used by growing grass. And we grow a lot of grass. I understand this was agreed in Paris in 2016 and is like a set of accounts that only has an expenditure page. If you think of grass like mini trees, it uses atmospheric carbon to grow, is eaten by a cow or sheep, turned into methane, burped out, broken down to CO2, taken in by grass, etc. Only the methane out and nitrous oxide from manure is accounted for. Despite manure being key to soil health and soil health being key to planet health.

Another example – the draff from Brora distillery, that our calves eat over winter, sits on our audit as a significant figure, equal to nearly all our fuel and electricity use. Grown for the high value distilling industry, it comes to us as a low value by-product. I have been unable to get answer on how the carbon from each ton of barley grown is divided up or counted. My suspicion is that as most weight ends up here we are allocated the bulk of the carbon. There needs to be more transparency on this.

Incidentally, as the distilling industry no longer wants to be seen to support animal agriculture as it is ‘bad for the environment’, all the draff from Clynelish Distillery is now trucked (with fossil fuels) to feed anaerobic digesters. These act like giant cows stomachs and, ironically, produce ‘renewable’ methane for industry. The same methane that accounts for two thirds of carbon output.

I have real concerns that Carbon Tunnel Vision (CTV) will lead to bad policy, green washing and long term biodiversity decline. It seems that despite one of the main concerns of climate change being its impact on biodiversity, there is very little direct support for biodiversity. Instead the entire world suffers from CTV, treating methane and manure the same as CO2 from fossil fuels, not recognising that livestock farms can be hugely diverse – convincing themselves that getting rid of animal agriculture is the answer.

As governments come to rely more on carbon audits, there needs to be recognition that the science and data is neither up to date or complete. Everyone I have spoken with who is involved at the calculations level recognises the difficulty in imposing lab results on complex, varied and adaptive grazing systems. Work is on-going but we are a long way from being accurate.

We’re not perfect. I’ve done a lot of flying in the last year and I should probably go live in a candlelit cave for a while. But I worry much more about this than our stock and their oversimplified carbon audits.

This is a column by Victoria Ballantyne who, with her husband Jason, owns Clynelish Farm in Brora.

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