Fewer cows in Antrim, more beef from Brazil?

24 October 2026 · Agriculture · Carbon · Trade · Northern Ireland · Thought piece

Cutting Northern Ireland’s herd while demand holds steady doesn’t cut emissions. It moves them, often somewhere worse.

Green grassland at sunrise with a feed mill and grain silos behind a line of trees — Grass is Northern Ireland's great farming advantage. The question is what happens when we use less of it.

In 2025, the UK imported 11,866 tonnes of fresh and frozen Brazilian beef, more than double the 4,997 tonnes of 2024. The rise has continued: 4,521 tonnes in the first four months of 2026. Then, on 3 September, the EU stopped imports of Brazilian beef, poultry and other animal products, because Brazil had not shown that its animals were raised without antibiotics used to make them grow faster. The UK has not followed. Defra was reported in July to be running its own checks rather than following the EU automatically.

Meanwhile, the Climate Change Committee’s advice for Northern Ireland assumes 31% fewer cattle and sheep by 2040 than in 2022. No minister has adopted that as a target. But it is the number that farmers hear, and it frames every conversation about NI’s carbon budgets.

Put those two facts side by side and you get the question this piece asks. If we farm less here, who farms instead, and does the planet notice the difference?

The case for cutting is real

Let’s be straight about the arithmetic. NI farming emitted 5.8 million tonnes of CO2e in 2024, 31% of the total and 10% more than in 1990, while the rest of the economy cut by about two-fifths. NI’s first carbon budget needs an average cut of 33% across 2023 to 2027, and we are at about 29%. The CCC has advised a 77% cut for the fourth budget, 2038 to 2042. Its own pathway says low-carbon farming practice delivers only about half of the reduction agriculture must make. Much of the rest relies on changing diets and land use.

So nobody serious can argue that farming gets a pass. The question is how the cut is made.

Demand doesn’t vanish when a farm closes

The OECD and FAO expect people around the world to eat 6% more animal-source food per person by 2034. Output of meat, dairy and eggs is projected to rise 17%, and global farm emissions by 6%. Most of that growth is in middle-income countries.

Northern Ireland produces far more than it eats. DAERA’s 2019 estimate was that our farms produce enough protein for about 10 million adults and enough energy for about 4.7 million, against a population of 1.9 million. Every litre of milk and kilo of beef we stop producing for Britain, Ireland and beyond is a litre or kilo someone else will be asked to supply.

That would be fine if the someone else did it better. Mostly, they don’t.

Where the carbon really sits

The FAO’s 2013 global assessment put milk from European herds at 1.6 kg of CO2e per kilo, the lowest in the world. The global average is 2.8, and the worst regions reach 9.0. NI has improved fast: DAERA’s latest figures show a kilo of NI milk carried 1,155 grams of CO2e in 2022, against 1,927 grams in 1990. That is 40% less carbon per litre.

Beef shows a starker contrast. The FAO found Western European beef has a low footprint largely because about 80% of it comes from the dairy herd, so the emissions are shared with milk. In Latin America and the Caribbean, about a third of beef’s footprint, roughly 24 kg of CO2e per kilo of carcass, comes from clearing land. Brazil’s MapBiomas survey found pasture grew by 62.7 million hectares between 1985 and 2024, and about two-thirds of the new pasture each decade replaced forest and savanna.

A policy that shrinks a grass-based NI herd and leaves the gap to be filled from cleared land is not climate policy. It is accounting. NI’s carbon budget counts what is emitted here. It does not count what we import, so the books improve while the atmosphere gets worse.

What other countries have learned

The international record is a useful warning.

The Netherlands set aside €4.2 billion to buy out livestock farms. Its national audit office reported in June 2026 that 1,329 farmers had used the schemes since 2019. About half of an 18% fall in emissions from animal housing came from closures. Only around 2% of cattle farmers took part, and 38% of the money went unspent.
Denmark will tax livestock methane from 2030: 300 kroner (about £34) a tonne, rising to 750 kroner (about £84) by 2035, with an automatic 60% rebate that grows when farmers take environmental measures. It was agreed with farmers at the table, not imposed on them.
New Zealand went the other way. In October 2025 it ruled out pricing farm emissions and cut its 2050 methane goal to between 14% and 24% below 2017. The government cited land-use change and food costs among its reasons.
The EU–Mercosur trade deal has applied provisionally since 1 May 2026. It will let in up to 99,000 tonnes of South American beef a year at a reduced 7.5% tariff.

The lesson isn’t that one model is right. It is that countries which set farming targets without looking at trade end up arguing about imports a few years later.

Campaigns can block the solutions too

There is an irony here. When Arla announced trials of the methane-cutting feed additive Bovaer on UK farms in late 2024, an online backlash followed. By February 2026 the Ulster Farmers’ Union was saying the product had lost its “social licence”, because farmers would not use something consumers would not buy. AFBI at Hillsborough is still trialling it and another additive, SilvAir.

When a campaign treats every cow as the problem, it ends up opposing the tools that make each cow emit less. That serves a narrative, not the climate.

What would actually work

Count what we import, not just what we produce. Publish NI’s consumption-based farm footprint beside the production figures, so a fall here that is matched by imports from cleared land shows up.
Put carbon in trade policy. The UK’s carbon border levy starts with steel, cement and fertiliser on 1 January. Food standards and carbon should be part of every trade deal that opens our market to beef.
Pay for efficiency and sinks. Reward lower carbon per litre and per kilo, and count hedges, trees and soils, as the Soil Nutrient Health Scheme starts to do.
Back the science and let farmers use it. Fund AFBI’s work, publish results in plain English, and treat proven additives as tools, not threats.
Change diets by choice, not decree. Better information and better food, not bans on menus. More on that on 24 November.

The strongest counter-argument

“The carbon budget can’t be met on efficiency alone, so NI’s herd has to shrink.”

On the arithmetic, that is right. The CCC says better farming delivers about half of the cut. My argument is about order and honesty. The herd should shrink as demand falls, not ahead of it. And our accounts should show what we import, so a smaller herd that just moves the problem abroad doesn’t count as success.

What would change my mind

Evidence that cutting NI output reduces global production rather than moving it elsewhere. Or proof that the beef and dairy filling the gap carry the same or less carbon, with no new land cleared. Show me either, and I will rewrite this piece.

Sources

Robert J. Park is an independent environment, carbon and public-affairs consultant based in Larne, Northern Ireland. Read the practical side in Focus on Agriculture and Focus on Food & Drink Processing.

Agree or disagree? Get in touch on LinkedIn or WhatsApp @robertjpark.