Livestock and Feeds GHG – Preliminary report on accounting tools

In 2017, an international project entitled: Capturing the Effects of Diet on Emissions from Ruminant Systems (CEDERS) was established and funded by the New Zealand Government to support the objectives of the Livestock Research Group of the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases. Led by scientists from the Livestock Research Group’s Feed and Nutrition Network (FNN), CEDERS looks to build on the findings of the related FNN Global Network project.

The main goals of CEDERS are (1) to examine dietary effects on on-farm GHG emissions and their trade-offs, both at the farm and national scales, (2) to support GHG mitigation research and (3) to align national agricultural GHG inventory research across a consortium of ten countries (Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and United Kingdom).

A Preliminary report on the applicability of process-oriented models for GHG reporting 2020 (right-hand panel), jointly authored by project leads; Ronaldo Vibart, Cecile de Klein, Arjan Jonker and Tony van der Weerden, has been completed as part of the CEDERS project and aims to:

• identify the most common on-farm GHG accounting tools used by the participating countries;
• explore the livestock GHG accounting approach used by these tools; and
• understand the potential benefits of adding further diet characteristics to on-farm GHG accounting tools for dairy cattle systems.

The focus is on methane emissions from enteric and manure management sources and nitrous oxide emissions from excreta and manure management sources.