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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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Environment
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Transportation is a tiny portion of any agricultural emissions, it's really producing it in the first place that matters. If global consumption levels don't reduce, then this is just an accounting shell game with emissions happening elsewhere
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
New Zealand needs larger reduction in cattle sizes than just a 10x in many areas for other environmental impacts. For instance, the dairy production in Canterbury is so high that there needs to be a 12x reduction in size to keep water at safe drinking levels because of its nitrate pollution
https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806
I suspect that the transport costs for NZ exports are much higher than the global or EU average because we are really far away from everyone else, also we don't get the bigger more efficient ships.
Also, Canterbury and Waikato share more of the cattle burden than the rest of the country so they'd need a much bigger drop to compensate.
Shipping is generally a lot more efficient per kg than you would think. For instance the article looked at 9000 km boat transportation for beef
We could change that to be New Zealand to Iceland (on the complete top of the globe and far away laterally too), but we'd still find it's a small portion of emissions. We'd bump up our distance to 15900 km or so meaning ~1.76x more distance than what they did the math on, putting it at ~0.6-0.7% of total beef emissions. Still not a significant driver compare to eating beef in the first place
Cool, nice to have figures!