FARMERS will feature in a campaign promoting what the beef industry says is the truth about livestock's environmental footprint.
Tired of misinformation surrounding the red meat industry, Meat and Livestock Australia is hitting back by heralding the environmental credentials of local producers.
MLA will use farmer ambassadors from across the nation to promote the "truth" behind Australian red-meat production systems and trounce misleading and damaging "urban myths".
MLA managing director David Palmer said the campaign would ensure producers were represented fairly in the debate over agriculture's environmental impact.
"Many calculations about livestock's environmental footprint are based on more intensive US or European production systems or use misleading science and are not accurate for Australian farms," Mr Palmer said.
"Despite this, they are often quoted in our mainstream media."
The campaign will target community leaders and the urban media.
It will also give producers a right of reply and defend the sector during debate over the inclusion of agriculture in an emissions trading scheme.
Mr Palmer said "solid facts to refute many of the existing claims that have quickly become urban legends" were underpinning the campaign.
"An example of such myths is that it allegedly takes between 15,000 and 100,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef," he said.
"As the University of NSW research demonstrates, it is actually between 27 and 540 litres, depending on the production system."
Misleading statistics come from simplistic calculations that attribute every drop of rain that falls on a farm to the production of red meat, Meat and Livestock Australia said.
MLA uses the example of 500mm-rainfall farm where each hectare would receive five million litres of water.
If 100kg of beef is the only agricultural product from this hectare per year, this calculation assigns 50,000 litres to each kilogram of beef, ignoring run-off, soil absorption and tree and plant growth.
Mr Palmer said the misleading nature of this calculation was demonstrated by the fact that the more the farmer reduced stock numbers and lowered beef turn-off, the higher their farm's calculated water use per kilogram of beef became.
He also pointed to statistics from the Department of Climate Change's National Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2007, which showed greenhouse gas emissions from Australian livestock had fallen 7.5 per cent since 1990.
Emissions from electricity generation and transport had both increased during that time.
Producers chosen for the campaign will show journalists examples of modern operations run with environmental stewardship.
