Recent Articles
Success at Dominion Post
Once more I welcome our new members. We are signing up between 15 and 20 new members each day. Our telemarketers have been going for four days and are signing up on average one third of the farmers they contact. This is a phenomenal result and shows the depth of feeling farmers hold about livestockContinue Reading …
Tim Groser implies current approach to agricultural emissions is not appropriate.
I have just received a letter from Tim Groser, Minister Responsible for Climate Change Negotiations in response to a letter I wrote on the 12th July stating my concerns about the treatment of livestock emissions of methane in international agreements. I quoted concerns about the use of the global warming potential (GWP) metric to calculateContinue Reading …
ETS Review Panel in Ga Ga Land
The ETS Review Panel’s report recommends that agriculture’s biological emissions be brought into the ETS as planned in 2015, with a few changes. Firstly that the two for one deal be extended so that in effect farmers will pay for 5 % of their emissions in 2015 rising to the full 10 % in 2019Continue Reading …
Carbon Trading to favour Aussie Farmers
Phil O’Reilly and John Carnegie of Business NZ believe New Zealand and Australia should able to buy and sell each other’s carbon credits. Australian carbon credits are created under the Carbon Farming Initiative and New Zealand carbon credits are created under our emission trading scheme. They believe New Zealand businesses should be allowed to importContinue Reading …
Membership
I’d like to welcome new members who have responded to the advertisement in the Straight Furrow. It was a bit of a gamble with the advertisement costing over $500 but I was so angry after the Q& A programme and combined with my frustration at our lack of resources to do what we want toContinue Reading …
Labour going to suck $4.8 billion out of agriculture
A perplexing weekend. I was watching Q & A, Paul Holmes was interviewing Don Nicholson the ACT candidate for Southland. Paul Holmes said that we need innovation and Labour’s $800 million R & D policy was good, and to fund it farmers were being brought into the ETS early, “farmers are sore about that” heContinue Reading …
Methane not 21 times more potent than CO2 after all
Quite a lot to report on with Dr Wilson Flood throwing a spanner in the works. He is a Doctor of Chemistry from the UK. I will report more on this later. A quick précis is that the premise that methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times more effective than CO2 is not right. FonterraContinue Reading …
Misrepresentations, misinformation and Dairy NZ
From the Dairy NZ website Carbon goes through a series of cycles through pastoral systems, and ruminant animals do not add any new carbon to the atmosphere. But that is really unimportant because ruminants convert carbon dioxide to methane, the greenhouse gas that is more than twenty times as powerful as carbon dioxide. Thus farmingContinue Reading …
PHil Goff’s plans for farmers.
Phil Goff announced Labour would bring agricultural livestock emissions into the ETS in 2013, two years ahead of the 2015 entry under National’s amended ETS. This would raise $800 million dollars for R & D, he said. A couple of flags went up for me when this was announced. Firstly if the Govt uses moneyContinue Reading …
Save NZ from its own Government
The Climate people are gearing up for the next round of talks on an international agreement on climate change. This will happen in Durban at the end of the year. In all the correspondence I have had with politicians like Nick Smith and David Carter and officials in MAF and MOE not one of themContinue Reading …
