Carbon footprinting your sheep enterprise

Manage your flock through livestock optimisation:

  • Input and track essential flock data, such as breed types, age profiles, and reproduction rates
  • Balance the flock’s nutritional requirements and sustainable land management, through grazing control and forage planning
  • Explore cost-saving opportunities, and maximise return on investment
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Agrecalc, an advanced agricultural calculator, proves to be an invaluable tool for sheep farmers seeking to optimise their sheep enterprise, and lower sheep carbon footprint. Tailored to the specific needs of the sheep industry, this versatile software assists farmers in making informed decisions, enhancing productivity, and improving overall sustainability.

Agrecalc stands as the premier choice for UK farmers when it comes to measuring and managing the carbon footprint of sheep enterprises. Rooted in the unique conditions of Scotland’s agricultural landscape, Agrecalc has built extensive experience in tracking and reducing emissions from sheep production, making it especially adept at addressing the needs of this sector.

One of Agrecalc’s greatest strengths is scenario testing for risk management, allowing farmers to model different situations without running costly experiments in the flock itself. 

female sheep ewe and lamb in a green field

Identify areas for improvement

GHG emissions directly correlate with resource use efficiency. By tracking flock data and its nutritional requirements, you can pinpoint the hotspots in your enterprise. This will help you budget and can aid forecasting profitability. After the initial data entry, you can spend less time worrying about where your money is going to, and more time on producing high-quality food.

Plan forage and silage needs

By allocating all home grown feed and bedding used on farm to specific enterprises, you can better understand the needs of your flock, and allocate resources where they have the best usage, helping with, for examples, the decision when to house them, or to prepare for months when grazing is a challenge.

“Forage first sheep systems” from SAC Consulting provides additional reading on feed optimisation.

Improve your grazing regime

When you’re moving the flock around your farm, it is necessary to know what the rest periods between grazing intervals are. By tracking the sheep’s movement across pastures, you can also keep an eye on the need for purchased feeds and their impact on your carbon footprint through their embedded emissions.

If known, enter digestibility and crude protein percentage of the diet for each livestock age class, which further helps calculate the GHG emissions.

Easily compare your enterprises

Your Report visually shows you the enterprises you’ve got, and when combined with different comparison parameters – like ‘farms with same enterprise’ or ‘farms in the top 25% of efficiency’, you’ll get a graph chart that informs you where you stand.

With this in hand, you can establish emissions goals, and draw plans, which can then be measured against the strategic goals of the business.

Meet targets in your supply chain

By baselining – knowing what your emissions are, and tracking them year-on-year – you can demonstrate reliability and enjoy a lasting relationship with your buyer. Processors can access farm or project groups in Agrecalc Cloud, collating and comparing all the relevant data in one place – and can benchmark within a specific group of suppliers, for example, within one programme or initiative.

Demonstrate sustainability commitments

With the supply chain under pressure from both governments and consumers to deliver GHG emissions reduction, both the farmers and the processors can secure the market and the premiums that come with demonstrable audit trail of sustainable farming practices.

In either mandatory or voluntary reporting on Scope 3 emissions, the reliable data, backed by the most up-to-date science, is the essential building block for demonstrating trust in ESG reporting.

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A story from a sheep farmer like you

Dorset sheep farm welcomes whole farm approach

Comparing data and encouraging farmers to keep records is a routine part of Emily Gascoigne’s work as a farm vet specialising in sheep. With 530 breeding ewes, including 340 Romney and Highlander ewes, Poll Dorsets – which autumn lamb – and 40 Hebridean breeding ewes, Emily and her husband Adam Smith found that it was important to unpick the inputs and then have figures to go forward with, and use as a benchmark further down the line.
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As a farm business owner, you collaborate with:

Agricultural Consultant

• Recommend actions based on data
• Guide your client towards sustainability
• Provide audit trail to help with finances
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Food industry - procurement

• Work with farms committed to sustainability
• Compare data and KPIs
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Sustainability manager

• Manage thousands of farms
• Benchmark your performers
• Report on sustainability progress
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Fill out the form to get the demo

You can request a demo of Agrecalc Cloud to be delivered straight into your inbox by submitting your details on the form below.

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