From milk, manure and meat to fleece, eggs and honey – animals have always played a key role in farming, and they contribute significantly to global diets and incomes.
But their impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can’t be ignored. How can we make the most of the benefits they bring while reducing the impact of their digestive systems on the planet?
Farmed ruminant species – cattle, sheep and goats – are thought to be responsible for around 30% of all global methane emissions linked to human activity.
Given the global trajectory towards reaching “Net Zero” GHG emissions, including the NFU’s ambition for British farming to reach this target by 2040, this raises important questions around the future of farmed animals.
How can we make the most of the benefits they bring while reducing the impact of their digestive systems on the planet?
Innovate to Mitigate
A recent discussion among peers and policymakers at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Science and Technology in Agriculture explored the huge potential of innovation in mitigating GHG emissions. The focus was on animal feed production as a significant contributor to net GHG emissions from agriculture. For example, 85% of the emissions from pork result from the feed.
Innovative solutions include increasing home-grown pulses to replace imported soya, introducing entirely novel protein sources such as insects (as in AgriGrub’s Black Soldier Fly insect-meal or via Better Origin’s insect larvae container farms), and supplementing the diet with seaweeds to adjust gut bacteria in ruminant animals and reduce the production of methane. Niche devices are also being designed to address emissions “at source” – for example Zelp (featured in Agri-TechE ’s 2019 REAP Start-Up Showcase) has created a methane-absorbing muzzle for cows.
Innovation in the form of precision breeding also has a role to play. There is a genetic element to the amount of GHG that an individual animal produces, we can take an epigenetic approach to identify these animals and ensure these low emitting traits are passed on in future herds. Antler Bio are researching key genetic markers to promote sustainability through data-driven epigenomics.
There exists a suite of other technical processes that can contribute to net zero agricultural GHG emissions on livestock farms, including generating green energy on-farm, harnessing robotics to maximise efficiency, deploying AI for welfare and productivity, and using electric vehicles for feed distribution and transport.
As encouraging as these technologies are however, mitigating via innovation will never be enough.
How does livestock fit into Net Zero?
While acknowledging the challenges of livestock, they still have an important role to play. There is an important trade-off (albeit a slightly imbalanced one) in that some animals can deliver important ecosystem services. For example, using animals in conservation grazing help grasses tiller (develop side roots), while soft hooves gently disturb soil to create micro-habitats for insects, microbes and seed germination. The right animal species can thin out, or clear, invasive vegetation and all animals reliably produce all-important fertiliser.
Understanding the role of animal production as part of healthy ecosystem delivery is a crucial element of the net zero journey. A recent report published by EIT Food (in collaboration with Innovate UK KTN) on the ruminant livestock industry and net zero targets considered the need to improve the understanding and complexity of carbon sequestration (the process of capturing and storing carbon in the soil). Unlike many industries, livestock farming has the capacity to both create and reduce GHG through regenerative agriculture practices such as soil enrichment and increasing biodiversity.
The bigger conversation about overall land management for net zero
While one can use tech at the level of individual animals, herds or even species level, the bigger conversation must also address the role of animals in land use. Farmland occupies three quarters of the land mass in the UK and Ireland, with around 65% permanent grassland. As such a huge landscape, grass-based meats have a massive role to play in sustainability, however livestock land needn’t be restricted to a single output.
In February 2023, The Royal Society published a policy report that calls for a strategic rethink of the way decisions are made about how landscapes and the services they provide are managed. The Multifunctional Landscapes report promotes a holistic approach to land management that considers both market and non-market outputs – including biodiversity habitats, flood alleviation and carbon sequestration.
By shifting to a multifunctional perspective and moving away from prioritising just those with immediate financial return, the landscape can increase its efficiency by producing a range of outputs – including those that support net zero.
Measure to Manage
To understand – and enhance – the benefits of ecosystem services we need better tools to understand and compare them. The EIT report included expected calls to incentivise, inspire and train farmers, but more crucially, it affirmed the urgent need for a standardised set of metrics and appropriate tools to measure them. The lack of standardised GHG data, including a baseline reference point from which to quantify and benchmark, continues to be a huge pinch-point.
Farmers and landowners must be able to measure GHG emissions in order to manage them.
This limitation is (slowly) being recognised. Last week, Defra published a Nature Markets Framework – a mechanism for increased investment in nature through the sale of ‘units’ of ecosystem services. The British Standards Institution (BSI) has been appointed to expediate a pipeline of investment standards which will facilitate consistent measuring, monitoring, and validation of on-farm interventions. The report acknowledges, quite rightly, that in order to make any headway in this debate, you need to be able to measure in order to manage.
Without doubt, animal production has implications for the net zero ambitions of the industry. However, with a multi-solution approach of enabling policies, targeted research and innovative technologies, mitigation is possible – and crucial.
Members are invited to join our interactive BlogChat online on 22nd May 2-3pm, where we’ll be discussing this topic in more detail. Please contact info@agri-tech-e.co.uk if you’d like to join and we will send the meeting info.
B-hive Innovations Ltd
SugaROx
MMP TAX LTD
British Beet Research Organisation
UK Agri-Tech Centre Ltd
Agri-TechE 
AF Group Limited
Zayndu Ltd
Future Farm
Harvest AI GmbH