Agriculture could be slugged with a carbon emissions levy instead of trying to tackle the difficulties of including it in the emissions trading scheme, according to thinktank, the Australia Institute.
The Rudd Government is hoping to incorporate agriculture into its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) in 2015.
But the Australia Insitute report, Agriculture and Emissions Trading: The impossible dream?, by Dr Hugh Saddler and Helen King, argues this initiative is unlikely to be successful.
Instead the paper puts forward three alternative options, including a carbon levy on farmers.
"The whole point of an emissions trading scheme is accurate measurement of the emissions of individual polluters in order to make them pay for what they emit, but when it comes to agriculture it is neither possible, nor efficient, to accurately measure the emissions of a herd of cows or a paddock of wheat," Dr Saddler said.
The report explains why the diet of individual animals, the soil composition and weather systems of individual regions and even the way in which fertilizer is applied can all have a significant impact on the level of emissions by individual farms.
Greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning a tonne of coal or a litre of petrol, on the other hand, can be measured both accurately and cheaply.
"There is another fundamental problem associated with agriculture in the CPRS," Ms King said.
"While only 1000 large polluters from the rest of the economy will be covered, the government is talking about including all 130,000 farm enterprises.
"When the administrative costs and the compliance costs are combined with the inaccuracies in measuring emissions, the idea of including agriculture in the CPRS just doesn't stack up."
Agricultural emissions account for about 16pc of Australia's total emissions.
In order to encourage farmers to embrace practices to reduce their emissions, the Australia Institute paper recommends three options:
* a carbon levy coupled with incentive payments;
* setting environmental accreditation standards that cover greenhouse emissions; or
* participating in voluntary carbon markets, which are already in use.
"These policy options, and others, are not mutually exclusive and a combination is likely to provide the best policy regime for abatement of agricultural emissions," the report states.
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