Attendees of last week’s BETTER Farm Beef Challenge national open day in Monaghan will have heard about the latest project that the BETTER farm programme is contributing to – the LIFE Beef Carbon project.

The project, which is being spearheaded in Ireland by Donal O’Brien and Jonathan Herron of Teagasc, is designed to tackle the increasingly important issue of beef carbon footprint.

Carbon snapshot

Wesley is farming 66ha of heavy, drumlin-type land in Co Monaghan.

He is running a 92-cow suckler herd with male progeny slaughtered under 16 months and females either retained as replacements, sold live or finished for beef.

Figure 1 gives a snapshot of the farm's beef carbon footprint.

The farm has a gross carbon footprint of over 11kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kg of liveweight gain.

When we take the amount of carbon sequestered (stored) by the farm into consideration, the net carbon footprint of the beef production is less than 9kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kg of liveweight gain.

On the emissions front, belching, fertiliser and lime and slurry management account for over three-quarters of the farm’s gaseous emissions.

However, the LIFE Beef Carbon project has been designed to look at the bigger picture and to factor in the positive contributions of beef farms that counteract the emissions problem.

In this case, we can see that Wesley’s farm is feeding 463 people annually, as well as storing 29t of carbon and maintaining 137ha of biodiversity.

Positive contributions

The following were highlighted as just some of the actions being taken by Wesley to help reduce his overall carbon footprint.

Wesley is trying to maximise the volume of grass grown on his farm by improving soil fertility and grazing infrastructure.

This increase in grass growth from improved grassland management will improve the farms response to N fertilizer and reduce carbon and ammonia losses.

By improving grassland management, the grazing season is now one month longer on the farm.

A longer grazing season increases the proportion of grazed grass in the diet and reduces the proportion of grass silage, thereby improving feed quality and digestibility.

By improving the digestibility and quality of the diet, the proportion of dietary energy lost as methane, the dominant emission source, is reduced due to an increased proportion of leaf at the expense of stem and dead material in the high-quality sward.

Wesley has a dribble bar slurry spreader in his yard.

Any low-emission slurry spreading technique reduces NH3 emissions by reducing the surface area of slurry exposed air.

A shift of slurry application to spring, combined with good practice and use of low-emission slurry spreading techniques, will reduce NH3 emissions from land spreading.

In turn, by reducing N losses from land spreading, these application techniques increase the N fertiliser replacement value (three units N per 1,000 gallons), thus reducing total fertiliser N inputs and associated N emissions from soil.

Protected urea is a new option to improve the nitrogen use efficiency of farms and reduce carbon footprints.

If not applied in correct conditions, up to 15% of N in unprotected urea can be lost as NH3.

Protected urea has been reported to emit 79% less NH3 emissions than unprotected urea.

CAN has been found to have the highest and most variable GHG emissions of fertilisers.

By substituting CAN with protected urea, N2O emissions will reduce by ~70% per unit N, therefore improving nitrogen use efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint of beef from farms.

For full details on the LIFE Beef Carbon project, see this week’s Irish Farmers Journal in print or online.