Recording of the third AgriDENZ webinar: Farm-level GHG accounting with DG-Agri

On the 7th of May, the AgriDENZ project hosted the third webinar in the webinar series on farm-level GHG accounting. On this day, we invited Andrea Furlan, Eszter Kis Csatari and Raphael D‘Andrimont from DG-Agri to present their ongoing work on building a consistent farm-level GHG accounting methodology for the whole EU based on the new Farm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN) data which is being collected starting from 2025. The aim is to provide comparable and harmonized farm-level emissions estimates across all EU member states. After the presentation from DG-Agri, Koohyar Khatami from Dairy NZ reflected on the presentation from a New Zealand perspective. Key takeaways: • From one year of joint work with the EU member states, the conclusion is that there is a heterogenous landscape across member states regarding farm-level GHG accounting approaches and that most existing tools focus on livestock. • The carbon calculator based on FSDN data shall include all direct agricultural activities. The future vision includes also considering scope 3 emissions such as inputs and fertilizers (upstream emissions) and processing and packaging, and use and end of life (downstream emissions). • Providing a consistent approach for the EU is challenging. Some main challenges include the allocation of flows between farms, data gaps and different levels of detail and maintaining national specificity while ensuring comparability. • A land-use model is under development in collaboration with JRC, where the FSDN data will be linked to the IACS database to enable studying land use changes over time. In the Q&A session following the presentation, the audience was curious to learn about details of the FSDN data, whether the calculator and LULUCF estimates developed by DG-Agri would become available to the public and farmers outside the FSDN-network, and about the farmers’ attitudes to the collection of data and estimation of farm-level GHG accounting.