Farmers say a 30 per cent on-farm emissions cut do-able - with Fonterra’s help

John Stevenson, Fonterra Cooperative Council chair, says 30 per cent target is in line with customer demand.

Fonterra farmers have yet to absorb the dairy heavyweight’s call for them to collectively carve 30 per cent off their emissions, but they’re in better mental shape now to deal with it than a few months ago.

That’s the reaction from Fonterra farmer watchdog chairman John Stevenson to Thursday’s announcement.

That an on-farm target was looming was flagged by Fonterra a year ago, the target due to be announced mid-year, but Stevenson said the delay had turned out to be a blessing as farmers were worn down by a seemingly endless wet winter, a milk price plunge and soaring interest rates and farm costs.

“The timing is as good as it can be given the pressure and the weather has eased a little. Our initial response....is that it does appear to be broadly in line with what our customers want of us and what some competitors are requiring of their farmers,” said Stevenson, whose council is elected by farmer-shareholders to guard their interests in Fonterra.

“Around August farmer confidence was as low as I’ve ever seen it. The timing today is far better than then. Optimism has increased.”

Fonterra chairman Peter McBride told the annual meeting the target was “confronting” but a must if Fonterra product was to meet the expectations of global customers and its legal and scientific obligations.

Fonterra’s 30 per cent “intensity” reduction target between 2018 and 2030 has already been scorned by critics of its 86 per cent on-farm emissions national profile because it will be measured by reductions per kilogram of milk solids, not by an across-the-board emissions reduction. The baseline for the measurement is 2018.

Fonterra expects the target to be achieved by a 7 per cent reduction through best practice farming; a 7 per cent reduction through novel technologies; 8 per cent through carbon removals from trees and vegetation; and 8 per cent from historical land use change conversions to dairy.

The 2018 baseline is so all the work counts that farmers have already done to reduce emissions, Fonterra said.

Stevenson said as a farmer he was encouraged by the “intensity” reduction because it was an efficiency measure.

“We wake up every day trying to be more efficient and more productive, making more milk from the same or fewer cows.

“This is better than a gross target but we will be leaning heavily on Fonterra to provide support and options to alleviate and mitigate the challenges this will bring on-farm.”

The council’s recent annual report took Fonterra to task for throwing its weight around in on-farm matters but Stevenson’s initial assessment was the targets were achievable, though “there’s a bit of stretch there”.

“The way I farm today is quite different from the way my father farmed and the way his father farmed. As farmers we’ve been changing, we’ve made a great deal of change over a relatively short time.

“This is a new challenge and we’ll be looking for on-farm support and investment and for Fonterra to use its scale to achieve what is being asked of us.”

Andrea Fox joined the Herald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.