SIR, – I’m a retired farmer and looking for guidance!

Domestic animals seem to be having a hard time regarding emissions and I do not understand why. School basic science taught us that elements can neither be created, or destroyed. They only change, depending on what compound they are a constituent of.

So, all animals, lions, tigers, domestic cattle, humans, mice, elephants, have emissions, probably in the form of methane. Surely these gases can have no effect on the atmosphere, as the individual elements have not been created (they cannot be) but merely sourced from the animal’s food.

The food itself has sequestered carbon from the atmosphere, so nil effect. We can argue all day about the timescale of the emitted gases breaking down, but surely the overall element balance is maintained?

I would sleep in a sealed garage with my pet cow, but wouldn’t survive long with a running vehicle in same building. Surely the main carbon issue is the use of hydrocarbons being brought from below the surface of the earth and then subsequently changing the atmosphere’s element content?

I suspect that many farms are net sequesters of carbon. If you take an upland farm anywhere in Britain, producing 1000 lambs and 60 calves per year, and farming 2-3 sq miles of hill, the farmer probably has one old tractor to make some hay, a quad to shepherd with and a farm truck.

Emissions are likely to be based on annual hydrocarbon usage of say 5000 litres. But on the other side of the equation, the meat produced must contain carbon, lots of it and the heather and grass will be soaking up carbon too.

Even with an intensive farm producing 5000 tonnes of cereals, there will be carbon produced in the production process (farming uses 2.4% of UK hydrocarbons) but there must be a massive carbon content in the cereal harvest, which are after all carbohydrates.

My frustration is that even our own Scottish Rural University College has, on TV, compared the annual methane output of a cow with that of a car! Completely erroneous conclusion, based on extensive research requiring a cow to be isolated in a monitoring chamber.

Farmers could grow oil, for instance from oilseed rape, which is widely grown and yields circa 300 litres per acre of oil which could be directly used in vehicles.

Hydrocarbons would have to be used in production, but still much less damaging than bringing hydrocarbons from beneath the Earth’s crust. I look forward to further opinions and comments.

William Halley