Mitigating GHG on Māori Farms in New Zealand

This report covers a project to assist the Māori pastoral sector to improve its collective capacity to increase resource efficiency, farm productivity, while reducing GHG emissions.

The project was based around the establishment of a network of 29 Māori farms, and intensive modelling on four of these farms to investigate and demonstrate the impact of mitigation strategies on farm profitability and GHG emissions. Profiling of the 29 farms indicated there is significant variation in GHG emission between farms, with dairy generally averaging 9,700 kg biological CO2e/ha/yr (standard deviation 2,407 kg CO2e) and drystock averaging 3,200 kg CO2e/ha/yr (SD 1,180 kg CO2e).

When compared to a national benchmark from farm monitoring farms the dairy result was found to be slightly higher (perhaps indicating greater intensification) and the drystock farm less than the benchmark.

A typology of the 29 farms was developed to reflect the key characteristics of Māori farming structure sand GHG emissions.

An initial assessment of the sample of the 29 farms showed that there was verylittle relationship between governance structure and GHG emissions, compounded by having arelatively small sample.

We concluded that the impact of Māori farm governance structure, e.g. trusts,incorporations, partnerships, companies, etc. on GHG emissions was minimal, i.e. that farmperformance and investment decisions was largely driven by the capability of governance andmanagement. However, decisions on the structure of the properties proved to be a critical factor in therange of options that a governance group has over mitigation options, e.g. dairy farms in general didnot have excess land to establish forestry for carbon sequestration, but an organisation with multipleenterprises/properties would have more mitigation choices especially for land diversification to reducetotal emissions.