Xavier P.C. Vergé1, James A. Dyer2, and Raymond L. Desjardins1. (1) Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, K.W. Neatby Building, 960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1A0C6, Canada, (2) Private Consultant, 122A Hexam Street, Cambridge, QC N3H 3Z9, Canada
Human activities result in about 65 % of methane emissions and the agricultural sector is responsible for about half of those anthropogenic emissions. In Canada, the main agricultural source of methane emissions (about 45%) is from ruminant livestock, either directly (though enteric fermentation) or indirectly (from manure decomposition).
The first part of this presentation will briefly explain the adaptation of this methodology for the Canadian methane emission calculations. In agriculture, meaningful Greenhouse Gas (GHG) mitigation policy development can only be achieved on a commodity basis. Failure to distinguish among industries such as grains and oilseeds, horticulture, beef or dairy, will result in economic instruments or management practices that are neither effective nor equitable. Therefore, interest in GHG indicators has recently shifted toward an intensity approach which links emissions to agricultural production. This approach relates the overall resource consumption to output and highlights the mitigative value of production efficiency. The second part of this presentation will then focus on all three GHG for the Canadian dairy industry only. To link methane with N2O and fossil CO2 emissions, animal population and feed ration data were used to define the dairy crop complex (DCC) to encompass only the areas from each crop used to feed dairy cattle. The application of this methodology for the year 2001 and the results obtained will be shown here.