Understanding your carbon footprint

A carbon footprint is a measure of the total amount of greenhouse gases generated at the farm, property, or enterprise level.

Conducting a carbon footprint is the first step to understand your individual opportunities for emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, and increasing efficiency of your farming system.

PIRSA co-funded the Carbon Footprint and Feasibility Project to help landholders understand the process for undertaking a carbon footprint. It includes interpreting the findings and applying them to:

• carbon baselines and benchmarks
• net emission reduction
• carbon markets and methods.

This project used the Melbourne University PICCC tools for each of the farms involved.

SA’s agricultural greenhouse gases

The State and Territory Greenhouse Gas Inventories (STGGI) outline the annual greenhouse gas emission estimates within Australia.

This is a part of the emission estimates in the National Inventory Report which is submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) each year.

The STGGI aggregates greenhouse gas emissions by categories of transport, agriculture, industrial processes, energy industries, manufacturing industries and construction, fugitive emissions from fuels, other energy, and waste.

^{South Australia's greenhouse gas emissions in the 2022 financial year – Image: Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. LULUCF includes both emissions sources and sinks (sequestration of carbon), when combined this provides a net figure.}

Agricultural emission sources

South Australian agricultural emissions are mostly made of carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and methane (CH₄). These arise from:

• enteric fermentation – production of methane from the digestive process of livestock
• manure management
• agricultural soils
• field burning of agricultural residues
• liming
• urea application.

The amount and type of greenhouse gases released from a primary production system depends on many factors, such as the type and size of production system, and the local climate.