Farmers and climate

Click the logo to visit the Farmers and Climate project website

Increasing farmer understanding of climate change and green house gases is a three year project funded by MAF, SFF and PGgRc. This project aims to increase sheep and beef, dairy and deer farmer awareness and understanding of climate change and green house gas issues and what can be done about them at the farm level and in the wider agricultural community.

A very important factor of the project is the involvement of 11 farmer groups across the country. Of the 11 groups, five are sheep and beef, four are dairy and two are deer. Each of these cluster groups will identify a local farm (either named or anonymous) which will be used as a case study to generate information about adaption and mitigation options using Farmax, Overseer and financial analysis.

This information will in turn be used to produce fact sheets and learning packages for the wider agricultural community. We are currently also looking at bringing in four Women in Dairying farmer clusters who would like to raise their knowledge of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions via elearning approaches. These approaches will be based on video-conferencing supported by technologies such as SKYPE, Moodle, podcasts, and webinars.

On May 25/26th 2010, a project Summit was held in Palmerston North which each cluster group is sending four farmers to. These farmers presented and shared the findings of their case studies and raised implications and questions from these for discussion with other farmers, MAF policy and industry representatives.

Find out more on the Farmers and Climate project website.