- [Narrator] Dairy is a huge part of New Zealand.
It contributes massively to our economy
making up 25% of our exports.
Agriculture's always been the backbone of the country,
but the perception of dairy is changing.
- We have done very little over the last 10 years
on climate change.
The failure of the governments to bring
the agricultural industry to heel is the problem.
- [Narrator] Dairy cows are one of the
most polluting animals you can farm,
and we've filled our country with them.
The massive growth of dairy over the last 30 years
has come with negative impacts on our environment.
Excessive fertilisers on our paddocks,
pollution of our rivers,
and high emissions contributing to climate change.
- The right thing to do is for all of us
dairy farmers to try to pull our weight,
do what we can and to find a way forward.
- [Narrator] In this series, I investigate
environmental issues down on the farm and seek solutions.
Farmers are part of who we are as Kiwis.
And so is the love of the environment we live in.
These are big issues for all of us here in Aotearoa
in the land of milk and money.
(upbeat music)
Looking at the New Zealand dairy industry,
arguably the most urgent impact it has is on our climate,
which is kind of weird when you think about it.
I mean, normally when we talk about the climate crisis,
it's alongside billowing factories and car exhausts
but here in New Zealand,
our cows are actually more responsible for emissions
than our cars.
I want to figure out why that is
and what we can do about it.
I was too young in 2003 to be here
when farmers protesting the 'fart tax'
drove a tractor up the steps of parliament here
but I was here a couple of years ago
when tens of thousands of students across Aotearoa
protested, demanding action on climate.
(protest chants)
So much has happened here.
And this has been like the battle ground
of discussing climate effects in New Zealand.
New Zealand's agricultural sector
makes up half our greenhouse gases.
Dairy alone is responsible for nearly a quarter
of all the country's emissions.
For most of the world, carbon dioxide
is three quarters of emissions with methane
and nitrous oxide making up the rest.
But due to the scale of agriculture here,
the figures are quite different with half our emissions
coming from methane and nitrous oxide instead,
dairy's methane comes directly from the cows
who burp it out.
The nitrous oxide comes from nitrogen fertiliser
and it's mostly released off puddles of cow urine.
While methane doesn't last as long in the atmosphere
as CO2, it does around 80 times more damage
in the time it's there.
Nitrous oxide actually lasts much longer than CO2
and is around 300 times more powerful,
which is why scientists have identified quickly reducing
these two gases is pivotal to combating the climate crisis.
Our government's made commitments to doing its part
and halting warming, but by all indications, we're failing.
New Zealand's current efforts have been evaluated
as insufficient by two leading climate organisations.
Their data shows if the world followed our example,
the planet would experience a four degree rise by 2050,
primarily because of our failure to properly address
agricultural emissions.
And some aren't taking that an action lightly
like Mike Smith, who's the Climate Chair
for the Iwi leaders forum.
He's actually suing the government
and New Zealand's seven biggest emitting companies,
including Fonterra and Dairy Holdings Limited
into taking stronger action on climate.
- [Mike] Successive governments have attempted to bring
the agricultural sector into the ETS,
The Emission Trading Scheme,
but they've failed. Largely because of the power
of the vested interests within the agricultural sector.
And I think just the lack of courage on behalf
of the politicians and bringing the agricultural sector in.
When I look at the faces of young children
of today's generation and they've got no idea what's coming.
We know that the future is looking pretty grim.
Now what's required is action.
Well, I was invited to represent the Māori people
of New Zealand at the 1992 Earth Summit,
which was held in Rio de Janeiro.
And that was the first time that world leaders gathered
to consider the issues around climate change.
I was living in Kaeo, which is a small town,
not too far from here.
We started experiencing devastating floods,
which were reported at the time as being
one in 100 year events,
but they were happening every two months.
It just became increasingly obvious
that what these scientists had told us in 1992
was starting to manifest in front of our eyes.
The impacts of sea level rise on Waitangi
and many of our communities up here is going to be profound.
We've got to dig up the bones of our ancestors.
That's a process that's fraught
with emotional difficulty and grief and anxiety.
So what we're seeing here as part of the coastal erosion,
it's coming as a result of the storm surges,
I've seen this road halved, great chunks
right to the white centre line taken out,
they're fighting a battle against the ocean
and the ocean will win.
Here we are outside the Whare Rūnanga
It was built in 1940 to commemorate the 100 years
since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
This is our paepae,
this is where the chiefs sit
and sort out the businesses of the day.
- Is that what we're doing?
- That's what we're doing,
sorting out the issues of our times.
- So how do you see climate tying into
Te Tiriti o Waitangi?
- Te Tiriti o Waitangi guaranteed
to protect our rights as Māori,
to our way of life and nature as the highest form of law
in our culture.
We're not living with the laws of nature.
We are destroying nature.
- What role do you think industry like
agribusiness dairy has played in those breaches?
- You only got to look at the history of the Land Wars
and they were fought in the Waikato.
They were fought in Taranaki
and they were fought over on the East Coast
of the North Island, around Whakatāne
and those are the most fertile lands
for agricultural pastoral farming.
So right from the get-go agribusiness
has been soaked in blood.
It's history is a history of blood and death.
I think we've got to go beyond sustainability
because what are we sustaining?
Are we just sustaining this very limited,
broken down environment that we're in,
we're trying to sustain it to that level?
Or are we trying to build it back up again?
So I think we've got to sort of start investing in nature
what the return is for that investment as being,
not necessarily a monetary terms,
but an environmental and social returns.
So it's time to smell the kōwhai and to act.
- In order to halt an increasingly disruptive climate
of droughts, fires, and floods around the world,
we must halt global warming to a 1.5 degree rise by 2030.
And by 2050 only be emitting as many greenhouse gases
as can be absorbed.
This is what our government committed to
in the Zero Carbon Act of 2019
It makes reducing emissions part of the law
and came in part from pressure
from young environmental activists.
But for decades,
agribusiness lobbying has managed to deflect
any kind of climate regulation that would affect them.
And again, with the Zero Carbon Act,
they delayed regulation for their sector until 2025.
Lisa McLaren was one of the driving forces
behind the Zero Carbon Act.
- I've been equal parts disappointed and furious
at our agricultural leaders.
How much misinformation they've put out
about climate change.
At the start, there was a real sense of anger
towards climate policy.
So I've been quite confused why the agriculture sector
and in farming communities haven't been championing
this climate stuff for the last 30 years,
because it's going to impact them
just as much as it's going to impact other New Zealanders.
I'm just sick of having to fight the lobby groups.
They're much more funded than a bunch of young activists
who were doing this in their lunchtimes
and after work or uni.
I saw year after year,
politicians were either trying to ignore the issue
or dismiss that it existed.
And I just got really angry.
We needed a plan to get New Zealand on track.
- When did you first start thinking about the climate
and growing up around here?
- I think what really hit home for me
was that climate change was in my own back yard.
It was going to make this river flood more
which would impact our farm.
That becoming more severe every single year.
I didn't know how staying here would be viable
if we didn't do something.
New Zealand's known that we're going to have
to do something about climate change for decades.
So what we needed was something that would legislate
the need for an actual plan.
And that's what the Zero Carbon Act was set up to do.
The Zero Carbon Act sets in motion
a long-term target that New Zealand has to meet
it sets up a Climate Commission,
which is to keep the government accountable
to these targets.
It puts in law the need to have a mitigation plan.
So a plan on how to reduce emissions
and also an adaptation plan.
So we've got a lot to prepare for
as well as reduce our emissions.
So I've been chosen to go over
to some of the climate negotiations.
And I went to one in Warsaw and also
the Paris Climate Talks,
which is known for the Paris Climate Agreement.
So I was there and saw countries sign the deal.
- Where does New Zealand sit
when we have those global climate conferences?
- Because our ag-emissions are so high,
we've actually been one of the countries
that's been quite disruptive in the climate negotiations.
And it was almost embarrassing to be a New Zealander.
And that's not something I've ever felt before actually,
but delegates would come up and be like,
I'm sorry that you're from New Zealand
and that your country is choosing not to take action
in a way that it could.
I think we actually need transformational change,
structural change.
We need to be rethinking full farm system change.
And we need to be thinking about that soon
and getting all parts of the ag-sector involved.
It's in everyone's interest and especially
our rural communities interest to get on top of this.
We don't have a choice, but to reduce our pollution.
The alternative is too scary to consider.
The impact on people, not just internationally,
but our own communities as well.
And it's not in 30 years, 40 years,
it's this year and next year.
- Despite dairy making up a quarter of our emissions,
New Zealand is actually one of the most
carbon efficient producers of milk in the world.
Unfortunately, these efficiencies can't really make up
for the fact that dairy cows
are one of the most polluting animals you can farm.
And we have filled our country with them.
Dairy farmers like George Moss in the Waikato
are trying to balance climate and cows through efficiencies.
With research showing that you can slightly reduce
on-farm emissions by using less imported feed
and fertiliser and increasing the amount of milk
each cow produces.
- Always been in a farming family. In 1981
my father encouraged us to do probably
which was one of the very first dairy conversions
from sheep and beef to dairy.
In terms of climate change,
I started off in the sceptics box
and then the signs globally became more and more compelling
that this was going to be a bigger issue.
There's no simple solution.
You start to fix the greenhouse gases.
It potentially impacts on your profit.
It potentially impacts on the number of people
that you employ. Because we were relatively low input farm
we could intensify, add very significant profit
to the business and probably employ another family.
But the downside to that, the quid pro quo would be
a massive increase in our greenhouse gas footprint.
What is the greater good?
Is it employment?
Is it profit and paying taxes?
Is it greenhouse gas reduction?
They are competing pressures.
It is a wicked problem.
The right thing to do is for all of us dairy farmers,
to try to pull our weight,
do what we can and to find a way forward.
What we need is leadership that will take us forward
to a place that we're probably uncomfortable going.
I think legislation has to be there to provide
the motivation for change.
We know some people will not.
So we need courts with a stick that says,
well, if you won't, I will sort it out for you.
It's a small proportion,
but they have tainted the rest of us.
It's one of the downsides of being in dairy.
We've all got lumped together as if we all perform
the same or have the same problems.
One of the things that we're trying to do for our farm
is reducing the number of cows,
we'll get some wins by actually reducing
the amount of nitrogen that we actually apply,
which will reduce the amount of nitrous oxide.
We do believe that we are custodians of the land,
and we do believe that we are building something
that is better, but at the end of the day,
it's about the people and helping people
find solutions, trying to find the way forward,
trying to find that sweet spot between profit
and environmental footprints.
- Unless we reduce the number of cows we have,
it won't be possible to meet our climate goals
through on-farm efficiency alone.
And so the industry spent the last 20 years
researching technological solutions to reduce emissions.
Things like new foods and vaccines.
These are often referred to as silver bullets,
a single solution that would work quickly to fix
the problem, but without having to change anything else.
There's actually a bit of early research
that's found a seaweed that when fed constantly to a cow
could reduce its methane production by up to 98%.
Unfortunately, for it to be that effective in New Zealand
we would have to house all of our cows
and feed them through a trough.
Michael Lakeman started a company that's looking
to cultivate the seaweeds and hopefully reduce
methane from cows here and around the world.
- CH4 Global is a startup that's focused
on zero methane agriculture.
We do that by growing a seaweed called asparagopsis
that when you feed it to livestock,
reduces the methane emissions.
- What have we got here?
- So this is the climate cooling solution.
- So humble.
- It is humble.
At the scale it's humble.
Really not a lot to it.
It's a little branching, tufted red seaweed.
- What is it about the seaweed that means
that we can mitigate ruminant methane emissions?
- There is an active compound that the seaweed produces
and concentrates that's called bromoform.
See if you can smell that,
it's a light kind of chemically smell to it.
- It's not unpleasant.
It smells quite nice.
- It's palatable to both humans and livestock.
We know there's huge demand,
1.5 billion cows on the planet.
They're going to eat a lot of seaweed.
- And so you could continue to grow more and more
asparagopsis in this kind of environment.
- Yeah, exactly.
This will just continue growing, dividing.
- What food does it require?
- This is seawater and all of the food
that the plant needs comes out of that.
Where's the seaweed coming from?
That's the big obstacle that remains to be addressed.
The scale of production that would be required
if we were to grow the seaweed out in the ocean
would be the amount of open ocean space
that is currently used for current aquaculture.
So you think in New Zealand,
we're currently growing mussels and salmon and oyster,
and there's an amount of aquaculture space used for that.
Same again in the seaweed and all of a sudden,
a third of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions
are wiped out.
- What scale of quantity will we have to produce
to feed New Zealand's dairy cows enough asparagopsis
to mitigate their methane emissions?
- For one cow each day,
we expect a dosing of about 100 grams
of dried asparagopsis.
This is all of about five grams.
- Right, so about 20 times that.
- 20 times this per cow per day.
All the research in feed trials has been in systems
like feed lock, where you're controlling the diet
in every mouthful that the cow eats.
New Zealand being a pastoral grazing system.
We need to be able to feed the supplement to the cows
maybe twice daily during milking period.
The effectiveness and methane reduction
from feeding twice daily, it's an unknown.
- How intensive would it be, the drying process
of the quantity of seaweed that you're talking about?
- Because the seaweed end its active ingredient bromoform
is quite delicate.
The seaweed has to be dried quite carefully.
So it requires a level of energy intensity
that's probably a little more than you'd see
with dried milk solids.
That's just the issue of gaseous emissions.
You still have other challenges
that dairying or livestock farming in New Zealand present,
carbon dioxide, nitrogen and nitrous oxide emissions
still need to be tackled.
If asparagopsis delivers the results
that we believe it's going to,
that does not reduce in any way,
the pressure or the importance on farmers
of the livestock industry to address the other challenges.
I don't think that the New Zealand public
is going to accept dirty water but clean skies.
You've got to have clean skies and clean water.
What you need is many solutions
coming at different angles to tackle these global issues.
- Is there a silver bullet for climate?
It turns out it doesn't really exist.
What we need is a silver buckshot,
hundreds of smaller solutions rather than just one big one.
In the next episode, we'll look at the basis
upon which all of these solutions will be built.
The whenua, the land and soil of Aotearoa.