Look out for us on the Country Channel on Sky. It is channel 99 and I am told that if you subscribe to it you can get a tax deduction on some of your Sky subscription. Check this with your accountant as I am happy to give advice on livestock carbon emissions but financial advice is not my thing. Maybe you could ask Gareth Morgan, he is giving advice on both at the moment. I have not read his book and probably wont but if any of you have read it I would be interested to know if he makes any comment on agriculture in the book. Let us know by putting a comment on our blog, but please limit your comments to livestock emissions I don’t want to open up a forum for all the skeptics and believers to vent about global warming. I know everyone has fairly strong opinions on this but our focus is on livestock emissions and is complicated enough without adding to it.
This was my challenge in front of the tv camera explaining in a sentence what we are about for an item on the Country Channel’s Farmgate programme. I think it went well but I would welcome feedback from anyone who sees it. So too would one of the other founding members welcome comments on the splendid job he did sharing his reasons for joining. He made several good points with certainty for the future for himself and the next generation of farmers one of them. He felt a responsibility to his children, who may want to be farmers, to do something and joining with us was a small investment that offered a large return.
There seems to be more and more press items about DCD and we will follow these, but the skeptic in me sees the use of emission mitigation to sell a product as just the beginning of an era in which farmers will be pressured into spending money to save the planet. We will do our best to ensure all claims made are legitimate.
Last word is to comment on claims circulating that as taxpayers and farmers you are already paying money for research and therefore you should not contribute to a group like ours. My comment is that the money you currently pay in levies is being wasted in terms of determining the truth about livestock emissions. All research being done assumes farmers and their livestock are guilty of causing global warming and does not seek to question this. I believe an academic review or study to determine the truth or otherwise of these assumptions is vital and it is a disgrace that such a study was not done first. Your levy money is not being used to do this, nor will it be, and that is why Pastural Farming Climate Research needs your support to get it done. Another benefit, apart from the obvious and large one of clearing farmers from the allegation of being atmospheric vandals, is that once we prove livestock are not the culprits of global warming your levy money will go to useful things rather than being wasted as it is now.