New Zealand's beef cattle population has increased by 82,000 in the space of a year, much to the dismay of Green MP Teanau Tuiono, who wants livestock herds reduced to help combat climate change.
"Reducing livestock herd sizes is critical to reducing emissions along with supporting farmers up and down the country who are moving towards organics or to regenerative farming, which can include reduced stocking," Tuiono told Newshub.
"Part of the challenge right now is that these things have often been seen as on the fringe. But actually if we were to fully commercialise those and roll those out, we could get huge gains.
"Support for regenerative agriculture alongside a complementary phase-out of nitrogen fertiliser, would make a big difference to efforts to tackle the climate crisis."
His comments came after Stats NZ released an official update on Friday showing the number of beef cattle was up by 2 percent - 82,000 - from the previous year and there was a total of 4 million as of June 30, 2021.
"The total number of beef cattle has been increasing steadily since 2016. Just over two-thirds of all beef cattle are farmed in the North Island," Stats NZ agricultural production statistics manager Ana Krpo said.
Tuiono's boss, Green Party co-leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw, also said last month reducing livestock was the only currently viable way of reducing our emissions.
"At the moment yes, there are no technologies that reduce emissions at the moment which don't involve deintensifying," Shaw said.
But a Newshub-Reid Research poll in February found that the majority of Kiwis - 50.4 percent - opposed reducing livestock herds, while 37.6 percent said we should and 12 percent didn't know.
The latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory released by the Ministry for the Environment showed New Zealand's gross or total greenhouse gas emissions increased by 21 percent between 1990 and 2020.
By comparison, the United States, the UK, Sweden, Romania, France, Ireland, Spain, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Finland and Croatia have all seen their emissions decrease.
The only time when New Zealand's total emissions dropped was between 2019 and 2020. Emissions decreased by 3 percent, largely because COVID-19 restrictions caused a decrease in road transport, manufacturing and construction, and domestic aviation.
Agriculture now makes up 50 percent of New Zealand's total emissions, followed by energy making up 40 percent. Emissions from the waste sector decreased by 17 percent due to ongoing improvements in the management of solid waste disposal at landfills.
Overall, New Zealand's total emissions comprise 44 percent carbon dioxide, 44 percent methane, 11 percent nitrous oxide and 2 percent fluorinated gases.
Methane is produced by livestock from their digestive systems and nitrous oxide comes from nitrogen-based fertilisers used to help crop plants grow faster.
According to the Ministry for the Environment, the increase in total emissions since 1990 was mostly due to increases in methane emissions from the dairy cattle population and carbon dioxide from road transport due to traffic growth.
The emissions reduction plan to be delivered in May will set out how New Zealand will aim to meet its first emissions budget (2022-2025) and set the path towards meeting our long-term climate targets of net zero emissions by 2050.
"Turning our agriculture sector from one of the biggest impacts on the climate and natural environment into one of its biggest solutions will help rural communities to thrive," Tuiono told Newshub.
"If we make the right choices now, we can create a thriving and sustainable farming sector that is good for farmers, good for communities, and good for the planet."
National leader Christopher Luxon is opposed to reducing livestocks to meet our targets.
"Agriculture generates 80 percent of our foreign export earnings, it's $9000 for every New Zealander in the country, it employs over 380,000 people and it feeds 40 million people internationally," he said last month.
'This logic of 'we've got to cull our herd' in order to get our emissions in place isn't good for the world because we're already the most carbon efficient producers in the world, and all we're doing is meeting the demand for that 40 million people that we feed, and it will go to another less carbon-efficient country.
"We need to change our mindset quite a bit, stop being so negative and thinking of farmers as villains, and come out and actually back them to be truly world-class - and that means investing much more in research and development."
Federated Farmers is pushing for more use of products like Bovaer, which goes in animal feed and is said to have the potential to cut methane emissions by up to 30 percent.
