Truth about food versus fuel

13-10-2008 | Not Specified

Like so many other farmers returning home, Craige Mackenzie is highly complimentary about farming practices in this country.

Especially the work research institutions such as the Foundation for Arable Research (FAR) are doing in trying to enhance farming practices while having a positive impact on the environment and at the same time retaining farmer profitability.

Deep nitrogen (N) testing is now common practice for arable farmers in this country, but this is not the case in the United Kingdom or the United States.

Similarly there is very little water monitoring being done on irrigated crops, so excess water just runs out the bottom of the soil profile or washes off the top.

In one US State Mackenzie visited, local government policy expects irrigation water to be used three times; by twice collecting it out of watercourses after it has washed out the bottom of the soil profile or by capturing excess runoff.

Mackenzie found that unlike farmers in this country, farmers in the US, UK and Northern Ireland are not particularly focused on being businessmen.

"They generally know how to get every last dollar in the way of subsidies, but they have no idea about their costs of production."

A meeting with senators in Washington DC explained how subsidies are intrinsically linked to food stamps. So while the farming sector receives $10 billion in support payments, city dwellers are provided with $50 billion in the form of food stamps.

This relationship is enshrined in legislation and it would take a change of law to break this relationship with food stamps and thus stop subsidies.

Something that is unlikely to ever happen.

The removal of subsidies in the 80's was, says Mackenzie, the best thing that ever happened to this country's farming industry. It made farmers very adaptable and quick to adopt new technologies.

Contrast this with farmers in the UK, US and Europe who Mackenzie feels are being held back by subsidies along with some reluctance to change farming practices used by previous generations.

In the UK farmers may no longer be receiving a Single Farm Payment rather they are being paid for the stewardship of their land, which is essentially a subsidy under another name.

Certainly in the area of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Mackenzie believes farmers in this country have more interest and a greater understanding of the issue than farmers in many other parts of the western world.

While farmers in the UK and US may be slow to adopt new technologies this has not stopped the researchers and there is some very interesting research work being done overseas, particularly in the UK and Denmark, around precision agriculture.

Of particular interest is their use of variable rate fertiliser applications.

Fertiliser spreaders are linked to a soil testing system which runs in the front of the fertiliser spreader and can feed results to a computer on the spreader. This is used in conjunction with GPS and soil mapping.

The soil tester, which is similar to the leg on a sub-soiler, is dragged through the soil instantly measuring N,P pH and water-holding capacity.

Satellite soil imagery is being developed in the US as another tool and this relates to soil fertility. When correlated with yield maps it allows farmers to see which areas of the paddock to target their inputs.

Mackenzie, who has long had an interest in precision agriculture, says it is in technologies such as these that will, in the future, help drive efficiencies on arable farms, but work needs to be done on how tools such as these fit into NZ farming systems.

"We need to continue to increase our efficiencies in production while improving our bottom line."

From an emission point of view Mackenzie says there is some interesting work coming out of the US and UK on relationships between inputs such as fungicides and GHG.

Crops which have been adequately treated with fungicides have been found to have fewer emissions per kilogram of grain produced.

This is because the crop is producing higher yields and GHGs are utilised by the canopy rather than being lost to the atmosphere. The same could be said about N.

In his travels Mackenzie found there to be a lot of misconceptions around the whole food versus fuel debate. In the US corn for ethanol was not replacing wheat acreage, as is largely reported.

There has been an increase in corn acreage primarily from set-aside area.

The areas suitable for growing corn are typically not suitable for cereal crops and vice-versa and wheat does not fit easily into a corn rotation.

Corn that goes into ethanol production loses 10% of its protein in the ethanol production, but is still being fed to animals in feedlots or dairy operations as Dry Distillers Grain (DDG), a by-product of the ethanol process.

Many ethanol plants he saw in the US have been left unfinished and other planned plants are unlikely to ever get up and running.

In the UK the government had abandoned the policy to set aside land for biodiversity functions, and farmers are using this land to grow cereal crops in response to price signals.

While there is a lot of criticism around biofuel production and the impact it is having on food prices, Mackenzie says some of the problem around food prices is also cultural.

"Up to 50% of the food produced in the UK is wasted and we would be horrified if we knew how much we are wasting here."

Food wastage occurs all the way along the chain from the ground to the consumer's refrigerator.

He believes climbing food prices may have a positive impact by encouraging consumers and supermarkets to be less wasteful, which of course reduces the carbon footprint.

In the past consumers spent an average of 30% of their disposable income on food, today it is around 7%.

Mackenzie believes it is an exciting time for agriculture, but farmers have to be mindful of where their costs are and maintain profitability.

High land prices have certainly impacted on the industry both in this country and in Europe and Mackenzie feels it is time to be cautious of buying land at high prices.

In the US the credit crunch has had a massive effect and consumers have simply stopped buying. This is having a flow-on effect into manufacturing countries such as China and is certainly having implications globally.

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