Calculate your farm's carbon footprint

Encouraged by her husband Drew Coulter who wanted to calculate the carbon footprint of their hill farm in Central Scotland, Dr Coulter did some reading on the web and found that with existing farm records she had all the data she needed to estimate the carbon equivalent footprint for the farm.

“Having seen how easily available the necessary data was to obtain I felt that perhaps other farmers would be interested in calculating the carbon footprint for their farming units,” she said.

They obtained a grant from the Leader + program in Lanarkshire which allowed them to contract a local web designer eOrchards (www.e-orchards.co.uk) to develop and launch their website which can be found at www.cplan.org.uk .

Farmers simply visit the website and enter the data from their own farms and the calculator will automatically return the carbon footprint for their business.

It is a free calculator and totally anonymous, although there is a small fee if clients want the data to be stored.

“This additional facility would allow farmers to explore different options in their farming businesses to mitigate or reduce their carbon footprint by adopting different techniques or systems e.g. reducing the amount of mineral fertilizer they apply or changing to a more carbon efficient tractor” she said.

“We think it is very important that the uncertainties in the calculated values are known. The belief is that governments are considering regulating greenhouse gas emissions from all businesses and they are keen that any new regulations for agriculture are scientifically justified as well as socially and economically feasible.

“We believe that if farmers are empowered by knowing and understanding how their own carbon footprint is calculated they will be in a better position to influence policy and implement change without it being imposed upon them.”

The Cplan calculator uses the methodology of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as this is the international standard. It multiplies the sources of greenhouse gases on a farm (number of cows, sheep, amount of fertiliser used etc) by a series of emission factors.