Farmers Face Growing Climate Change Dilemma: Scientist

Farmers of the future will have to use cattle and sheep that belch less methane, crops that emit far less planet-warming nitrous oxide and become experts in reporting their greenhouse gas emissions to the government.

Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and globally that share will rise as demand for food from growing human populations also increases, scientist Richard John Eckard of the University of Melbourne said on Thursday.
But farmers are facing a near-impossible challenge: feeding the world while trying to trim emissions and adapt to greater extremes of droughts and floods because of global warming, he said.

In coming years, farmers will have to monitor and report emissions as more nations move toward emissions trading.

“We want agriculture to feed the world. We want farmers to be viable and continue to increase the rate of productivity growth. At the same time, we’re telling them they are going to face a more harsh climate they need to adapt to.

“On top of that you impose a policy that you can now only emit a fraction of the emissions that you were emitting,” he told Reuters from Perth, Western Australia, during a climate change conference.

Eckard said research into ways of trimming those emissions while maintaining production growth was not advanced enough.

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