Who Decided New Zealand's Cows Needed This?

When the big food companies sit down with New Zealand's meat and dairy processors, the planet's temperature isn't on the agenda.

That's not my reading. It's Wayne McNee's.

The AgriZeroNZ chief executive wrote in a letter to the Rural Guardian that those meetings are "acutely focused on New Zealand's contribution to their scope 3 emissions". Not, he wrote, on New Zealand's share of global warming.

"We can debate the science of methane until the cows come home," he added.

Scope 3 is accounting language. It means the emissions a company doesn’t make itself but buys in through its suppliers. When a supermarket sells New Zealand beef, the methane that steer burped counts towards the supermarket’s own total. That’s the “contribution” McNee is talking about.

Part 1 found a capsule of synthetic bromoform headed for young beef cattle. Part 2 found its owners. This part follows the demand back to where it starts.

The customers have names

McNee named them. Tesco, Sainsbury's, McDonald's, Nestle, Danone and Mars, he wrote, are all pushing into their supply chains with science-based scope 3 targets.

"All of those will look elsewhere if we can't meet their requirements," he told Business Canterbury in November 2024.

Silver Fern Farms, as Part 1 showed, says about a quarter of its supply goes to buyers with these targets. In December 2024 its chief executive, Dan Boulton, told suppliers a major high-value US retailer had signed it up as a grass-fed beef supplier, Rural News reported. He didn't name the retailer.

Alliance, the other big meat company, joined AgriZeroNZ on 5 October.

Alliance isn't fully farmer-owned any more. Irish processor Dawn Meats took a 65% stake in December 2025. Dawn Meats has its own approved science-based targets, and told an EU food industry platform in July that it will reset its baseline this year to take in Alliance, in line with the farm-sector rules.

What "scope 3" means for a paddock

Companies sort their emissions into three piles. Scope 1 is what they burn themselves. Scope 2 is the electricity they buy. Scope 3 is everything else up and down the chain.

For a meat company, everything else is mostly the farm. In 2024, 96.6% of Silver Fern Farms' emissions were scope 3 emissions on supplier farms.

So when a supermarket in London promises to cut its scope 3, it is promising to cut something that happens in a steer's stomach in Southland.

A buyer's target becomes a processor's target. A processor's target becomes a farm's problem.

Who invented scope 3

The idea came out of Washington, DC.

The World Resources Institute was set up in 1982 with a US$15 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation. It launched the first Greenhouse Gas Protocol standard in 2001, the accounting rulebook that created scope 1, 2 and 3. The protocol is run jointly with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Before it existed, WRI was working with General Motors, Monsanto and BP to get companies reporting their emissions, the protocol's own history says.

Here's the bit of trivia I didn't expect. When the protocol launched its full value-chain standard, its director listed the demand that drove it. First on his list: "In New Zealand, exporters of dairy products were being asked to account for food miles."

We were in it from the start.

Who sets the targets

Counting emissions is one job. Deciding how far a company must cut them is another. That job belongs to the Science Based Targets initiative, or SBTi.

SBTi was founded by CDP, the UN Global Compact, the We Mean Business Coalition, WRI and the conservation group WWF. It is a registered charity in England and Wales, with a subsidiary that charges companies to check their targets. More than 12,000 companies have validated targets.

SBTi says setting one is "entirely voluntary". It also tells businesses the targets deliver "competitive advantage".

In September 2022 SBTi launched rules for food, land and agriculture, known as FLAG. WWF co-led the work. Food producers, food processors and supermarkets must all set a FLAG target, according to SBTi's launch slides. The emissions covered include, in so many words, "enteric emissions". Cow burps.

The project was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Companies that road-tested the rules included Mars and Danone, two of the customers McNee named. Danone is also listed as a past funder of SBTi projects, on SBTi's own funders page.

The target that needs the bolus

Silver Fern Farms had its targets validated by SBTi in 2025.

Its beef target is to cut emissions per tonne of beef by 16% by 2032. Beef got a target because SBTi has a pathway for beef. It has none for sheep or deer, the company says, so its sheep target sits outside SBTi.

The first AgriZeroNZ tool is a bolus for beef cattle.

Progress so far is small. Beef emissions intensity went from 17.93 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per tonne of carcass in the base year to 17.88 in 2025, according to Silver Fern Farms' 2025 greenhouse gas inventory. The target is 15.02.

The company says what it would take. Bigger cuts "will depend on AgriZeroNZ investments being commercially available and being used by a large group of our suppliers."

Silver Fern Farms is careful to say these are company targets, not farm targets. It is "not about imposing unrealistic expectations for our farmers to bear on their own," its 2024 report says.

But the maths only closes if farmers use the tools.

Fonterra goes a step further. Its SBTi-validated targets include a promise that 78.2% of its suppliers and customers, measured by emissions, will have science-based targets of their own by 2028. Fonterra says it is reassessing its targets after selling its consumer business to Lactalis.

The rules don't just apply to companies. They recruit.

Who pays the referee

SBTi's past core funders include Amazon, the Bezos Earth Fund and the IKEA Foundation.

The Bezos Earth Fund gave it an US$18 million grant in 2021. In the year before that grant ran out, Bezos and IKEA money made up 61% of SBTi's funding, Mother Jones reported, republishing the Guardian. The fund says the grant ended in December 2024, as agreed.

The money now comes from somewhere else. In 2025, 74.6% of SBTi's income came from validation fees, about US$24.7 million of US$33.1 million. The referee is mostly paid by the players. SBTi says that income "has no influence on decisions surrounding their targets."

The same billionaire's fund reached the other two rule-writers. Its first grants, in November 2020, included US$100 million each to WRI and WWF.

Four months later, WRI's president, Andrew Steer, left to run the Bezos Earth Fund. WRI credits him with enlisting more than 1,500 companies to science-based targets. He stepped down from the fund in February 2025. It is now run by Tom Taylor, a former Amazon senior vice president, GeekWire reported.

The offsets row

In April 2024 the SBTi board said companies could use carbon credits against their scope 3 emissions. Staff and technical advisers said they hadn't been consulted, the Guardian reported. Dozens of staff called for the chief executive and board members to resign, including a Bezos Earth Fund fellow, former Colombian president Ivan Duque.

A month before the announcement, the Bezos Earth Fund had organised a two-day meeting in London with offsets on the agenda. Offset industry figures were invited. One projection put the change at US$19 billion or more for the voluntary carbon market.

One SBTi adviser said it was "hard not to see a link". The fund strongly disputed that. Steer said any suggestion the bodies it funds don't make their own decisions "is clearly wide of the mark." SBTi said any change would go through consultation.

Oxford researcher Kaya Axelsson put the bigger problem plainly. Voluntary bodies like SBTi are "vulnerable to special interest capture", she said. "Ultimately this should be a role for governments."

Part 2 showed a carbon broker owns a slice of the bolus company, lined up to sell credits from the cow's missing methane. Whether credits count against a scope 3 target is the same question as whether anyone will buy them.

The banks walked out

Banks had their own club. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance asked lenders to line their loan books up with net zero.

In February 2025 its members still included Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Westpac, ANZ and Rabobank, Beef Central reported. The six biggest US banks had already left, after state attorneys general raised legal concerns.

Commonwealth Bank owns ASB. National Australia Bank owns BNZ. Those two, plus ANZ and Rabobank, are the four banks inside AgriZeroNZ.

Canada's big banks left next, then HSBC, Barclays and UBS. In October 2025 the alliance voted to shut down.

The lending pressure didn't vanish with it. Silver Fern Farms says its leaders are held to its emissions targets through their pay and through targets in sustainability-linked loans.

The retreat that didn't reach the farm

Overseas, a lot of this has gone backwards.

The Bezos money stopped. One SBTi technical council member said of it that billionaires were "bowing down to Trump".

In December 2025 the EU cut its sustainability reporting law back to companies with more than 1,000 staff and €450 million in turnover. Smaller firms can now refuse supply-chain data requests that go beyond voluntary standards. The duty to adopt a climate transition plan under its due-diligence law was dropped.

New Zealand did the same at home. In October 2025 the Government raised the threshold for compulsory climate reporting from $60 million to $1 billion, halving the number of reporting entities from 164 to 76.

The voluntary system kept going. Silver Fern Farms got its targets validated in 2025. Fonterra is reassessing, not dropping, its targets. Dawn Meats is setting new ones that will include Alliance.

The laws retreated. The supply contracts didn't.

Where the rule comes from

Parliament has passed climate reporting law. It covers big listed companies, banks and insurers, and it asks them to report.

It has never told a beef farmer to put a capsule in a steer. Last year the Government scrapped its plan to price farm methane, as Part 1 noted.

And yet the Crown owns half of AgriZeroNZ, and matches every private dollar that goes in. The taxpayer is paying to help meet targets the taxpayer never set.

Follow the target back from the paddock and you pass a meat company, a supermarket, a charity in London, a think tank in Washington and a billionaire's fund.

You don't pass Parliament.

That's the end of the Franken-Cow series. Part 1: what they're putting inside the cow. Part 2: who owns the bolus.

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