“The new work aims to develop a suite of ready-made tools that will reduce greenhouse gases by 30% by 2030, while supporting the agricultural industry’s growth targets of 2% each year.”
Together with the funds contributed from consortium partner and lead agency AgResearch, the research will focus on:
Refining animal breeding tools for low-emission livestock
Identifying more low-greenhouse gas feeds
Identifying inhibitors that reduce ruminant emissions
Developing a vaccine to reduce ruminant emissions
Understanding the productivity effects and enhancing the adoption of mitigations.
Agriculture played a critical role in the NZ economy and unless technical solutions were found to reduce agricultural emissions there might be significant ETS liabilities in the future, Aspin said.
“We’re completely focused on developing technologies that are practical and can be readily adopted by farmers.”