Carbon farm gas calculator

News story from 'Climate Change, A NSW Department of Primary Industries special feature', in The Land, October 2008

Alan Dick

NSW DPI economist at Orange, Pat Madden, has been working on a user friendly online spreadsheet so farmers can assess the carbon emissions from their individual operations.

[Also see update below.]

Farmers throughout Australia will soon be able to assess the carbon emissions from their individual operations through a new online tool the NSW Department of Primary Industries is developing.

DPI economist at Orange, Pat Madden, has almost completed assessing the basic information in a complicated series of spreadsheets and is about to send it to an internet developer to convert it to a user friendly online process.

The project, tentatively titled 'FarmGAS', is being financed by the Federal Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and managed by the Australian Farm Institute.

AFI executive director Mick Keogh said that, as well as allowing farmers to make greenhouse gas calculations, the tool would also enable them to work out gross margins.

'They will be able to play around with different combinations of farm enterprise to examine the greenhouse gas implications as well as farm business implications,' he said.

Mr Keogh said the program would incorporate an assessment of potential carbon sequestration from farm forestry, but not from pastures.

'The calculator is being developed in compliance with Australian methodology for estimating greenhouse emissions,' he said.

Pastures could not be included because carbon sequestration in soils and pastures was not part of the Australian greenhouse emissions inventory due to international greenhouse emission accounting rules that are part of the Kyoto Protocol.

'If we had included pasture and soils it would have created expectations farmers could benefit from changes which they can't under existing rules.'

Mr Madden said the development of the online tool was being overseen by a scientific advisory committee.

He said a farmer using the tool would key in information on his enterprise, such as number, live weight and weight gains of their cattle or sheep, information on the amount and type of pasture, on their cropping operation and on any agro-forestry enterprise they had.

He said numbers on emissions from cattle, for example, would be different for each state because of different pasture and soil conditions, temperatures and rainfall.

'There is going to be an option to look at different waste management which is important for intensive industries - whether it is spread on pastures or placed in a lagoon.'

Mr Madden said however the tool would not be able to discriminate between regions within states, except in Western Australia which would be divided into three regions and in relation to trees everywhere.

He said estimation of carbon sequestration by trees would use the National Carbon Accounting Toolbox (NCAT) which covered different tree species in various locations in each State.

'Farmers will be able to run simulations, to look at what would happen if they altered their system.'

He said farmers would also be able to alter the default values for various aspects of the program if they believed they had sufficient knowledge and that would give them a closer estimate to the real levels of methane emission from their cattle for example.

The program would also allow them to enter a range of sheep classes for more accurate results.

See another news story on the FarmGAS calculator: Gas calculator coming.

Update

The FarmGAS calculator is now available on the Australian Farm Institute's website at http://farmgas.farminstitute.org.au/publicpages/AFIPublic.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fdefault.aspx. 

Return to News stories
Return to Soil carbon and climate change