Australia has underestimated how many cattle it has by about 10 million, with significant implications for tracking greenhouse gas emissions, a Queensland researcher has said.
Cows’ methane-laden burps are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions emitted by the red meat sector, which has an aspirational goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Official estimates, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, state there are 26 million beef and dairy cattle in Australia in 2024.
But a 2021 report by the University of Queensland, published in the CSIRO Publishing journal Animal Production Science, concluded the real number could be about 35 million – 56-75% higher than the figures published by the ABS and widely accepted by government and the red meat industry. The ABS estimate is also what is used to calculate emissions from the red meat industry.
Geoffry Fordyce is a former veterinary scientist from the University of Queensland and lead author of the report. He said the findings further challenges the assumption that there has been a 65% reduction in emissions from Australia’s red meat industry on 2005 levels.
That reduction was calculated in another report by the CSIRO, commissioned by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), and has already been called into question by scientists who say it is also based on unreliable land clearing data.
“They’re working with faulty data,” Fordyce said. “If they admit there’s 10 million more cattle than they originally thought, they’ve got a real problem.”
The ABS figures are based on surveys completed by farmers, which are then extrapolated into national figures. Fordyce, who has spent more than 40 years working on cattle stations across Queensland and south-east Asia, said farmers “openly admit they underreport what they’ve got”.
“There’s all sorts of sentiment associated with big brother, the taxation office and all the rest of it,” he said. “They just don’t want anyone to know what they’re really doing.”
The ABS’s head of agriculture statistics, Rob Walter, said while he had “a lot of confidence” in the farm surveys, they were never designed to measure Australia’s total cattle population because they excluded small-scale producers.
“They are clearly a lower estimate than the actual number of cattle,” Walter said.
Walter said there was “probably a level” of underreporting in ABS surveys, particularly in Northern Australia. “Some of those properties in Northern Australia are the size of small European countries,” he said. “For them to know how many cattle they have [on reporting day] can be very difficult.”
The underreporting affects the total greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the Australian beef sector. Australia’s beef cattle herd is estimated to have released the equivalent of 57 million tonnes of C02 annually in methane between 2015 and 2020.
If Fordyce’s estimates on total cattle numbers are used, that figure could be as high as 90 million tonnes.
‘There wouldn’t be enough cattle’
Farmers in Australia are required to register cattle, sheep and goats through the national livestock identification system (NLIS). Livestock must be fitted with an electronic ear tag before it is moved between properties or taken to a saleyard.
But that requirement only kicks in when the animal leaves the property. Walter said because herd fertility rates and the portion of cattle that leave the farm are highly variable year on year, the number of cattle on farms can be hard to determine.
Fordyce said his team arrived at the shortfall of 10 million cattle by working back from slaughter, export and mortality data, which is accurately tracked through the NLIS.
“We figured out that, roughly speaking, there are about 10 million cattle exiting the industry each year.” he said. “If you believe the industry’s data, the herd would disappear in a few years. There wouldn’t be enough cattle [on farms] to support that kind of output each year.”
The ABS discontinued its farm surveys in July 2023 due to declining response rates and to reduce reporting burden on farmers, Walter said.
He said the ABS was working with government, industry groups and academics, including Fordyce, to produce new figures using a range of data sources that better reflect the actual number of cows in Australia.
Walter expects the new data, to be released in May, to be higher than previous survey-based reporting.
“We’ve made a commitment to making things easier for farmers, as well as to increase the availability of quality data,” he said.
A spokesperson for MLA said the unaware of underreporting of cattle numbers, but that it can be difficult to estimate how many cattle there are on remote properties on reporting day. The association conducts its own online survey to gather data on the national herd.
“MLA will continue to support activities to ensure the most accurate data is available to inform the red meat industry’s progress in terms of emissions,” they said. “If improved datasets become available, these will be incorporated.”
The chief executive of the Northern Territory Cattle Association, Will Evans, said there was “no advantage” to producers in underreporting cattle but that “we don’t currently have a tool … to accurately estimate the size of the national herd”.
“We’ve got a lot less people working in the regions than we used to who are able to verify and accurately collect data,” Evans said. “You need people driving around in utes talking to people.”
• This article was amended on 12 March 2024 because the study led by Geoffry Fordyce was conducted by the University of Queensland and published in a journal owned by CSIRO publishing, it was not a CSIRO study as an earlier version said.
