Climate-neutral beef for sale

Supermarkets in the US, UK and Australia now stock carbon-neutral beef. New Zealand's Silver Fern Farms exports it to the US.

Genevieve Steven, agriculture economist at Rabobank, said that it was not easy to translate emission commitments into action because consumers were already paying more for beef now than any other time in history.

Rob Lawson, a sheep and beef farmer from Dunedin, was part of a Silver Fern Farms carbon-neutral beef pilot project. He sold carbon credits to Silver Ferns Farms, who used the credits to offset carbon produced by livestock. Lawson had entered 200 hectares of native bush into the Silver Fern Farms project. The amount of carbon that the bush sequestered was verified by an independent company and sold on to Silver Fern Farms.

The current price for carbon is above $70 per tonne but Lawson sold it at an agreed rate lower than the current price. The native bush used to sell carbon was not eligible to be in the emissions trading scheme, Lawson said.

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