Why Agriculture is Difficult to Include
Agricultural emissions can’t be measured with the necessary certainty but a new paper from the Australia Institute says that agriculture shouldn’t be let off the hook and should be encouraged to adopt best practice methods of emissions abatement now.
There is an inherent variability of agricultural emissions.
Agriculture produces three main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane from the digestive systems of livestock and nitrous oxide from chemical processes and microbe activity in agricultural soils. But actual emissions depend to a large extent on natural phenomena totally outside human control.
“It is neither possible, nor efficient, to accurately measure the emissions of a herd of cows or a paddock of wheat,” Dr Saddler from the Australia Institute said in a statement.
The diet of individual animals, soil composition and weather of individual regions and even the way fertiliser was applied could all have a significant impact on the level of emissions by individual farms.
“Greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning a tonne of coal or a litre of petrol, on the other hand, can be measured both accurately and cheaply,” he said.
[tags] Agricultural emissions, Carbon dioxide, Coal, Fertiliser, Greenhouse gases, Methane, Nitrous oxide, Petrol [tags/]
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