Estimating on-farm emissions

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Supporting farmers to reduce on-farm emissions

New Zealand farmers are some of the world's most emissions-efficient producers of meat and dairy.

The agriculture sector has an important role to play in meeting our climate change obligations.

To support the reduction of emissions on farms, we’re investing in the development of tools and technology.

A standard way to estimate emissions

Farmers can’t manage what they can’t measure. We have worked with the sector to develop a standard way to estimate a farm's agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. This is to ensure:

transparency
consistency
robustness
fairness.

The standard methodology was released on 13 December 2024.

Government media release: Government delivers standardised emissions measurement tool – Beehive

Benefits of a standard methodology

Currently, there are more than 10 emissions calculators, all using different methods to estimate emissions.

We expect our standard methodology to be used by existing emissions calculators and farm management tools.

Having a standard method:

is a critical part in supporting farmers to understand the main drivers of emissions and ways to reduce them
provides an opportunity to enhance the credibility of sustainability claims made by our food and fibre exporters
would enable new products and features that improve farm management and reporting.

Standardising estimation is a key step towards pricing emissions in the future and will support on-farm emissions measurement by 2025.

Having a standard method will also enable new products and features that improve farm management and reporting.

Using the methodology

The first version of the methodology (released 13 December 2024) includes current science. New technologies will be added to annual updates as they become available.

The method was released in 2 formats: