Jonathan Herron

Research Officer, Livestock Systems, Teagasc

Jonathan Herron is a Researcher Officer in the Livestock Systems Department of Teagasc Moorepark. He is one the lead researchers in the development of the AgNav sustainability Platform in collaboration with ICBF and Bord Bia. He supervises a team of PhD students and post-doctoral researcher in the areas of life cycle assessment, bio economic modelling, and integrated farming systems.

He has a number of publications in the area of life cycle assessment and has recently secured funding from the Department of Agriculture Food and the Marine for the continued development of the AgNav platform to expand the scope of the assessment to include all major agricultural systems and environmental impact categories.

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Pathways to climate neutral farming systems

The EU’s sustainable growth policy, the Green Deal, aims to curb climate change by cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and enhancing carbon removals. Ireland is supporting the EU Green Deal through implementing the Climate Action Plan mandated in the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2021. The Bill legally commits the nation to a 51% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030 relative to 2018 levels, and requires the state to reach climate neutrality by 2050. Climate neutrality in an Irish context means a sustainable economy where GHG emissions are balanced or exceeded by the removal of GHGs.

Achieving the ambitious national targets requires concerted action from all sectors of the economy, including agriculture. In contrast to most European nations, agriculture accounts for a major share (35%-40%) of Ireland’s GHG emissions (Duffy et al., 2023). This is in part because Irish agriculture is comprised mainly of pasture-based ruminant livestock systems i.e. beef, dairy and sheep farms. It is also caused by the lack of heavy industries in Ireland, which tend to dilute agriculture related emissions in industrialised nations. Last year, Teagasc re-examined the capacity to mitigate agricultural GHG emissions using a marginal abatement potential curve (MACC). The third version of the Teagasc GHG MACC showed the sector can meet the 2030 climate commitments by widely adopting existing mitigation practices, and by developing and implementing new technologies e.g., feed additives (Lanigan et al., 2023). Post 2030, Irish farmers will need additional emission reduction and removal technologies to become climate neutral. This study seeks to develop pathways to climate neutrality for some of the Teagasc Signpost demonstration farms, namely beef, dairy, sheep and tillage farms. For these farms, climate neutrality was evaluated on a territorial basis with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology.

Read the full paper Pathways to climate neutral farming systems (PDF)