Agmates

South East QLD Farmer Viv Forbes writes:

I am calling on all farmers and those who eat farm products to raise their voices in opposition to the silly proposals of Australian and New Zealand governments to include emissions and motions from farm animals as a taxable carbon emission.

All cows are “green” like the one below when looked at in the right light.

The chairman of Carbon Sense Mr Viv Forbes, claimed that New Zealand has already agreed to include farm animal emissions in their taxable emissions output and Prof Garnaut is also thinking of driving Australian farmers to the Kyoto bail for a similar milching.

We smart farmers in the South Pacific must have the longest cows in the world - they feed on farms in Queensland and Queenstown and are about to be milked in Canberra and Wellington.

Photo below of Viv Forbes taking a break on the farm with a good mate - his Maremma Dog.

I am an animal breeder, pasture manager and soil scientist, and can’t believe the lack of noise from farm groups and consumers on this matter.

Any farmer would know that no cow, sheep, pig or goat has yet managed to create carbon out of nothing. Nor do they eat fossil fuel. Every bit of carbon sequestered in meat, bones, wool and milk, or expelled in solid, liquid or gaseous animal waste, was extracted from the air by the pastures and grain crops the animals ate.

Pastures, crops and soil fungi live on carbon dioxide, the universal plant food from the atmosphere, and water and minerals from the soil. Ultimately, all carbon in the food chain comes from the air (apart from some artificial “foods” made from coal or petroleum derivatives, and very minor soil humus derived from oxidized coal or oil shale).

Photo below of Green Cows taking on Solar Fuel. (These are our Braford breeders on our property at Rosevale.)

This carbon extraction process starts the day the animal is conceived and ceases on the day it dies. This is the carbon food cycle we all live by.

In fact all farm animals should get a carbon credit, because they sequester part of the carbon extracted from the air in bones, meat, milk and wool. Much of this carbon then gets transferred to the bones and flesh of the growing human population, and eventually gets sequestered in sewerage (often, unfortunately, on the sea floor), bones in the coffins, and soil in the cemeteries. This is a proven process which provides more secure and far cheaper carbon sequestration than some of the billion dollar schemes being investigated.

In this respect grazing animals are just like trees; both sequester CO2 for their lifetimes, sometimes much longer.

Photo of Magic Dorper sheep using grass to extract carbon from thin air. (These are our dorper meat sheep.)

Of course other parts of the food chain generate net carbon emissions for agricultural machines, processing, chemicals and transport. Each of these activities would attract its own carbon tax. None are essential elements in the raising of domestic animals - the essentials are soil, water, grass and the atmospheric gases, especially oxygen and carbon dioxide.

No matter how you do the sums, farm animals cause a net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Thus they should get a carbon credit, certainly not a carbon tax.

We all know the moon is made of green cheese. It is time to educate politicians that all cows are also green.

Have Your Say!

Should emissions and motions from farm animals be treated as a taxable carbon emission?

Leave your reply below or click on the blue word Comments and the reply box will appear.

SE QLD Farmer and Chairman of the “Carbon Sense” group Viv Forbes writes:

Responding to the draft Garnaut report, it is becoming very clear that carbon dioxide is not a key driver of earth’s temperature, and attempts to reduce man’s emissions of CO2 will do more harm than good.

There is certainly no justification for the premature imposition of any de-carbonisation proposals in Australia - no emissions trading systems, no cap and trade nonsense, no subsidies for converting food to motor spirit, no mandating of fairyland energy proposals, no geo-sequestration and no more carbon taxes.

Photo of “Carbon Sense” Chairman Viv Forbes. Viv farmers in South East QLD and breeds Stud and commercial Damara Sheep. Seen here hold a Damara Ram.

However, if we were forced to choose between all the above unpalatable de-carbonisation alternatives, “Carbon Sense” would reluctantly support a simple carbon tax on all net direct emissions of CO2 from all industries. This should be accompanied by the IMMEDIATE abolition of all the other state and federal legislated Greenhouse foolishness.

As soon as the climate and the science make it clear, even to economists such as Professor Ross Garnaut (pictured), that man does not control the climate, we can then easily abolish the silly carbon tax.

(Editors Note:

All four major global temperature tracking outlets Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS have released updated data which show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped dramatically. Check the Graphic out for yourself by Clicking Here.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.)

The Precautionary Principle so loved by those spreading doomsday stories on everything, even suggest that a simple carbon tax is far less risky than grandiose plans to create an expensive and artificial bubble industry based on Carbon Emissions Trading.

The immediate effect of cap and trade legislation is the creation of new electronic assets called “permits to emit” with no reality, no separate existence, no asset backing and no intrinsic value whatsoever. Their value depends solely on a politician’s promise that people holding an emissions permit will have a protected position compared to those without a permit.

As soon as the government creates these securities with no substance and the Carbon Bank which stores no carbon, a huge new artificial industry will be created. There will be administrators and auditors, bankers and brokers, barristers and bureaucrats, carbon credit farmers and foresters, lawyers and lobbyists, traders and tax advisers, and all the high paid never ending research jobs in Zero-Gen and Zero emissions.

This picture shows how nature works in hard times. Look at the co-operation on our farm, between our Senepol Bull, who is pushing over the Leucaena saplings so he and the Damara, Dorper and Meatmaster rams can get a feed.

To some people, the Greenhouse industry looks like the saviour of Australia after the last coal mine and the last cement plant are closed, the last farm becomes a carbon credit plantation, and the sounds of planes, trains, trucks, tractors and dozers are no longer heard in the land.

Decarbonisation will never create one more roof on a new house, a slice of toast on one plate, a steak on a single barby, a blanket on one bed or a light in one dunny. And the warm inner glow from Canberra will not boil one kettle in Cairns.

When the real economy dies, so too will this huge parasitic bubble economy manufactured in Parliament. It will be better for all concerned that it is never created.”

Have Your say! To start or join the online discussion with Viv Forbes about this topic click on the blue word Comments below and on the next page type your question / comment in the box provided.

Viv Forbes QLD Cattle & Sheep producer writes:The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that mis-guided government policies on global warming were going to cause a crisis in food.

Viv Forbes The Chairman of Carbon Sense, said that subsidizing ethanol, taxing carbon fuels and covering grasslands and farms with trees would cause massive dislocation of rural industries and shortages and runaway prices for food.

The ethanol swindle has sucked in many people, but the costs will far exceed the benefits. Demand for ethanol feedstock has already caused massive increases in prices for corn in USA and similar things will happen with sorghum and sugar in Australia. If the current foolish policies persist, these problems will also infect the soy industry, palm oils and other grains.

Australian taxpayers will subsidize a huge ethanol plant being built at Dalby which will gobble 500 tonnes of grains per day, that is a lot of chook feed.

Rising prices for grains, sugar and soy will feed through into higher prices for all food produced in farms, feedlots and factories. Beef, lamb, dairy products, chicken, eggs, breakfast cereals, bread and confectionery will all become more expensive, to the detriment of every consumer. The biofuels mania has caused price increases for pasta in Italy, cornflakes in Kansas, tortillas in Mexico and croissants in Paris.

According to a recent EU report: The current push to expand the use of biofuels is creating unsustainable tensions that will disrupt markets without generating significant environmental benefits.

Ethanol contains less energy than is used to produce it. Making alcohol from corn is a good way to make whiskey, but a terrible way to make motor spirit.

Moreover, to produce one litre of ethanol uses 4 litres of water, so ethanol plants will cause increases in the prices of both food and water.

Naturally there are vocal beneficiaries of the ethanol boom, but the net cost to the whole community will be negative. It will always be cheaper to produce motor fuel from oil or coal than to use fossil fuels to produce organic fuels via ethanol.

We should plant our seed corn, not turn it into motor fuel. Burning food for fuel is a very fuelish policy. What do we do as an encore? Pay subsidies to oil companies to produce pizzas from petroleum?

Even more foolish than subsidizing ethanol is the process whereby people are encouraged to evade carbon taxes by planting trees.

These force fed forests will result in a creeping infestation of woody weeds into land currently producing grass, pastures and crops.

If some extremists had their way, Australia would become a monoculture of unproductive eucalypts, which are rightly regarded as invasive weeds in other countries. And the rules for carbon credits will probably dictate that they stay there forever, becoming a haven for feral pests and weeds and a magnet for bushfires.

There is a place for trees in any productive landscape, and previous stupid government policies caused excessive clearing of trees on government controlled leasehold land. But banning all land clearing and subsidizing tree planting is just as stupid.

Farm forestry or wildlife refuges should be allowed to flourish on a fair basis alongside all other land businesses. None should receive discriminatory tax breaks. Well managed grasslands can extract just as much carbon from the air as will tree plantations (unless the trees are harvested and turned into timber houses).

“The final stupid food policy will be carbon taxes, which will push up the already high costs for fuel and power for every farming operation. Soaring prices for diesel, petrol and electricity will escalate the cost of operating tractors, harvesters, trucks, dozers, road trains, water pumps, feedlots, food processing plants and supermarkets. The end result will be seen at every checkout.

The world has always depended for most of its food on great grasslands of Australia, the savannas of South America, the prairies of North America and the farmlands on the European plain. And the key food resource is the native and domesticated cereals and grasses and the grazing animals that live in harmony with them. Turning these ancient grasslands into forests will have far reaching and costly consequences.

All of this is justified to calm a world hysteria about the modern era of global warming which started long before man started burning fossil fuels and will continue to rise or fall irrespective of what puny vote-seeking politicians do.

Despite the recent Ignobel awards to Al Gore, more and more independent scientists are concluding that the facts and the evidence do not support the hysterical claims that the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by mankind will cause runaway warming.

A Judge in Britain got it right recently when he called Gores film a biased political document with eleven specific claims not supported by any evidence.

Politicians are about to inflict huge Greenhouse costs on the whole community, for nothing.

Viv Forbes

Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, MS 23, Rosewood Qld Phone 0754 640 533