Farmers in Australia are watching the New Zealand Government with growing horror as they move from the announced 10 per cent cut in methane emissions to actual regulatory rules mandating these cuts take place, starting 2025.

The climate change game was great fun while everyone played with monopoly money and they could afford to outbid each other with their virtue, but now that that we are moving to playing with real money and going from targets to taxes, it is clear the virtue signalling has ended and the targeting of who pays has begun.

The carbon game has effectively become the hunger games, leaving the weak and the smart nations to cash out or attempt to cash in without playing with their cash or simply to watch from the sidelines urging the players to bet up big as the stakes get ever higher.

New Zealand has gone all in, betting all its chips on its farmers cutting methane emissions by 10 per cent within 8 years.

Fortunately, our leaders, in the form of Agriculture Minister Murray Watt and the Prime Minister have not sought to match our cousins at the high roller table.

Maybe they understand the basic science that, while methane is indeed produced by ruminants, it breaks down over 12 years back into its component parts of H20 and CO2 and the CO2 is absorbed by plant material and eaten by livestock thereby being rapidly cyclical.

Unlike fugitive emissions from fossil fuel extraction which take thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years to rotate between the atmosphere, oceans and earth, methane is a relatively quick closed loop.

Keep the number of ruminants stable around the globe at around a billion each of sheep, goats and cattle and their impact on global warming is effectively net zero.

Until we can get the IPCC to fully recognise that only the nett gain/loss in numbers of livestock should be attributable to global methane levels, farmers in western countries are going to be at the mercy of governments desperately looking at ways to achieve their emissions commitments.

Globally farmers need to be aware of the political and economic freight train coming down the 2030 tunnel.

The trains light will first fall on NZ but behind them are parked Canada and the Netherlands as all have put their farming sector down as gambling chips to stay in the climate game.

Australian farmers need to be alert that our government wants a seat at the table.

What is the point of a select few countries taxing their livestock numbers down to achieve cuts by 2030 when these stock will be replaced by others in countries like Brazil and India.

The Netherlands and New Zealand have around 10 million cattle each while Brazil and India have around 300 million each. Neither of these big livestock producers has any intention of introducing a methane tax on their livestock.

Australia has to think carefully about how it achieves its target of a 30 per cent methane emissions reduction and 43 per cent carbon reduction by 2030; we don’t want to follow the NZ pathway and play for sheep stations.

Crazy Brave Jacindanomics

Our cousins across the ditch have long been recognised for their economic extremism, launching from agrarian welfare state in the 1940s through to enthusiastic embracers of market deregulation under Labor Rogernomics in the 1980s.

In all three cases their farming community bore the brunt of the economic costs of their government’s wild swings between regulation and deregulation.

New Zealand is back in the economic headlines and back into the era of agrarian regulation as it seeks to be the first to adopt a methane tax that will achieve a 10 per cent cut by 2030 and 47 per cent reduction by 2050.

Dire predictions by panicked farmers that their number one industry could lose 20 per cent of all ruminant livestock and with it a similar number of farmers by 2030 seem not to worry their Prime Minister.

Agriculture is a significant part of the New Zealand economy, making up around half of their export earnings. In comparison Australia’s farming sector accounts for less than 10 per cent of our exports and just over 2 per cent of our economy.

So, a production tax on methane on their farmers is either crazy brave or a master stroke of international marketing.

Jacindanomics has it that farmers will be better off because they will be able to sell their produce at a premium to the rest of the world, being tagged not only clean, green but also carbon net zero.

A similar promise was made to farmers in the Netherlands and Canada that the promised premiums would outweight the new taxes, but that promise has yet to be proven in the marketplace hence their farmers are as sceptical as their New Zealand competitors.

Unfortunately, farmers know all too well that the market for premium produce is about as big as the market for teslas which have a global share of 1 in every 70 cars sold. Premium electric is a niche market no different to organic food, a product only the comparative rich can afford.

Australia should watch the latest move by New Zealand carefully.

Our cousins across the ditch have a well deserved reputation for being crazy brave.

While being crazy brave might serve you well in the history books, it’s not always a good way to ensure the next generation of farmers survive to tell the tale.