Macdoch foundation chief Michelle Gortan joins The Australian Ag Podcast

Macdoch Foundation chief Michelle Gortan joins The Australian Ag Podcast to discuss natural on-farm capital and how it can change farm evaluation.

Natural capital has the potential to provide a huge boost to farmers’ bottom lines and drive rural property prices up further.

“If we can quantify what natural capital looks like on a particular property that adds a whole new layer of information that could inform property prices,” Macdoch Foundation chief executive Michelle Gortan told The Australian Ag Podcast, out today. “This is the really big opportunity here.”

Macdoch Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Macleod family in Australia, and aims to “build the resilience of the people and the planet” through the regeneration of natural and productive landscapes, climate change solutions and regional and rural mental health and wellbeing.

One of the foundation’s flagship projects, Farming for the Future, is designed at addressing a knowledge gap in agriculture in regards to valuing and harvesting natural capital, which Ms Gortan described as “everything producers manage for the benefit of their businesses, their families and society” including soils, remnant native vegetation, productive pasture lands, crop lands, riparian areas, water resources, agroforestry, environmental plantings and animals.

“In the conversations we have around the project and around natural capital, one of the things we’ve really focused on making very clear is that natural capital is more than just carbon in agriculture,” Ms Gortan said.

Macdoch Foundation chief executive Michelle Gortan.

She said the aim of Farming for the Future was to become “a catalyst for knowledge and information” by firstly creating an evidence-based, robust data set about the condition of Australia’s natural capital on its productive landscapes.

“That is something that doesn’t exist at the moment,” Ms Gortan said. “No one in Australia really knows what the condition of our natural capital is, and that is a really critical thing for us to address in thinking about restoring our natural capital and rejuvenating it and building up the supply of natural capital.”

“We think we can create this data set and evidence base that says the relationship between natural capital and farm profitability of private farm benefits is this.”

She said there was also a need to create a mechanism for producers to manage and measure their natural capital, as well as a benchmarking prototype.