Willera Merino’s is committed to working towards a climate positive position, validated by a third-party.

To help us along the pathway to achieving this goal we have participated in a range of carbon emissions initiatives, designed to help us better understand our onfarm emissions and be able to make a plan for emissions reduction.

In July 2022, with the assistance of NZMerinos and the ZQRX Program, we completed our first Producer Carbon Footprint with Integrity Ag.

The assessment we completed excluded emissions from cropping, and estimated our total emissions from cradle to farm gate.

The methods applied was Integrity Ag & Environment’s verified carbon footprint system (VCFS) which is published in Wiedemann et al. (2015) and is compliant with the International Organisation for Standardisation Carbon Footprint of Products (ISO 14067). The methods are also compliant with the Australian Sheep Sustainability Framework (ASSF). Our results can be compared to the results from the sheep sustainability framework.

We learnt from this emissions footprint 85% of our emissions on farm are due to methane release from our animals.

This has led us to look to participate in numerous trials with ANU and other organisations to better understand our animals and their methane footprint to be able to make positive changes through our management.

Comparably we also learnt our GHG emission intensity (kg CO2-e/kg greasy wool), without sequestration from soil and vegetation, is +30% lower than the NSW case study farms involved in the study and +20% lower than other regional farms.

Our farm showed better results then the average across all metrics including lamb marking rate (%), Wool sold per breeding ewe (kg greast/head) and live weight sold per breeding ewe (kg liveweight/head).

DOWNLOAD OUR REPORT HERE

Recently, in 2023 we have been accepted into the Agriculture On-Farm Action Plan Pilot project which uses the SB-GAF and G-GAF rools to undertake emissions estimates.

We are looking forward to completing this program to be able to give us an insight into activities we could adopt on farm to reduce our emissions footprint.

The ambition is to continue to explore our carbon footprint with the aim to create an emissions reduction plan for our farming business.