Modelling greenhouse gas and nitrogen emissions from cattle

• Feed management decisions are an important element of managing greenhouse gas (GHG) and nitrogen(N) emissions in livestock farming systems as they strongly have an impact on emissions in beef and dairy cattle production systems.

• To quantify the impact of these abatement measures at different stages of the feed and manure management chain, different modelling approaches are used.

• Statistical and empirical models are well-suited for practical applications when evaluating mitigation strategies, such as GHG calculator tools for farmers and for inventory purposes. However, combining a whole set of process-based models that represent the underlying processes causal of emissions and their drivers within the system (Fig. 1) and simulates the variation in GHG and N emissions and the associated whole farm budget has not been used.