Canada - Pork Industry Introduces Updated Draft Pork Greenhouse Gas Project Builder
Published:November 2, 2006
Source :Farmscape
The Canadian pork industry has introduced the latest draft of a software package designed to help swine producers calculate the number of greenhouse gas offset credits they may be able to sell.
The Pork Greenhouse Gas Project Builder is a computer based calculator which allows the swine producer to quantify his operation's greenhouse gas emissions and determine the number of offset credits that will be generated by adopting certain technologies or production practices.
The latest draft is being introduced through a series of workshops that began last week in the Maritimes and will travel to Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta next month, Ontario in December and then to British Columbia.
Canadian Pork Council environmental programs coordinator Cedric MacLeod says the software was developed using the best available Canadian science according to ISO 14064 standards and is internationally recognizable.
The builder is of value because, for the last three years, through the greenhouse gas mitigation program, we've talked to producers extensively about different practices that would allow them to manage their greenhouse gas emissions from an operation.
However we weren't able to provide them with concrete data to back up a lot of the claims that we had on different technologies and practices.
This software package will allow a Canadian pork producer to input production data such as feed usage and ration composition, herd inventories into the system and identify some different practices that are ongoing on the operation and the project builder will actually estimate what kind of greenhouse gas output can be expected from that operation.
MacLeod notes there are lots of opportunities though regional greenhouse gas carbon markets that have popped up in California, Oregon, the northeastern US states and there is now an operating market in Alberta as new power generation stations are required to offset emissions if they're running on some of the dirtier forms of fossil fuels.
