Net zero: Farmers stride towards low-emissions target
As politicians drag their feet on climate change action, these farmers are taking real, measurable steps to cut emissions.
When Andrew Young’s son, Carl, first suggested the family’s multimillion-dollar salad and vegetable business become carbon neutral, Andrew didn’t think it would be possible.
Red Gold, based at Wemen along the Murray River in northwest Victoria, is not a “lifestyle” farm, Andrew says: “It is a business and it is bloody hard work.”
But what the family found when it did a full carbon inventory of the business surprised them, and the Youngs are now one of several successful Australian farming enterprises leading the way on initiatives to reduce and offset carbon emissions.
As politicians debate the finer details of Australia’s path towards net zero, agricultural businesses across the nation are showing farmers are not only on the front lines of adapting to climate change, they are also leading the way to a low-carbon economy.
For Red Gold, one of the challenges was the property’s location. Andrew Young’s parents bought the Wemen property, 100km from Mildura and 40km from Robinvale – the heart of almond-growing country – because they couldn’t afford to buy land closer to a town, he says.
The hot, dry climate has the advantage of being able to produce salad greens in winter while farms further south struggle with cooler and wetter conditions. But the distance – 500km from Melbourne, 960km from Sydney and 1600km from Brisbane – means long and carbon-intensive freight hours to deliver their products to market.
The Youngs thought offsetting the emissions from freight would be their biggest challenge, but they soon found they had other, more carbon-intensive practices to account for.
Andrew was initially “sceptical” when he and Carl decided to do a full carbon inventory of the farm.
“I thought it might just prove that we’re buggered,” he says.
The company, which employs 45 people at the peak of its season, competes with other salad companies across Australia for contracts with the big supermarkets. So while reducing and offsetting its emissions, the business had the added challenge of staying competitive and profitable against producers that weren’t taking steps towards carbon neutrality, Andrew says.
The carbon inventory revealed some surprises. One was that some of their biggest emissions were embodied in farm inputs they purchased, including seeds. Another was that offsetting the company’s emissions would cost just 0.5 per cent of its turnover at current carbon prices – about the same as the annual vegetable levy. For every $1 million of turnover, the inventory revealed the farm produced 259 tonnes of carbon emissions, with electricity the biggest emitter at 19 per cent.
The family had already planted Mallee scrub across the property in an effort to revegetate, and after assessing their options, Carl decided they couldn’t produce carbon offsets at a large enough scale for it to be financially viable. Instead, they decided to turn to the carbon market to purchase offsets.
The carbon market is a fast-growing industry, with demand for offsets outpacing supply and revenue that could reach $24 billion by 2030, according to the Carbon Market Institute.
After a lengthy process, on October 13 the business was officially certified carbon neutral by the Federal Government’s Climate Active program. Andrew now shares his story to encourage more farmers to consider tracking and offsetting their emissions. “This problem is a global problem and (farmers are) a part of it,” he says.
STEVEN HOBBS
Grain grower, Kaniva
Fourth-generation grain and sheep producer Steven Hobbs is producing carbon credits on his 800-hectare mixed cropping and grazing property at Kaniva, in Victoria’s western Wimmera.
Hobbs radically reassessed his farming practices and started to sequester carbon on his land when a devastating frost hit his family’s property in late October 1996.
Coined a one-in-100-year event by the Bureau of Meteorology, the frost affected the whole grain-growing region and wiped out about 70 per cent of Hobbs’ harvest. About the same time the following year, another frost came through. Then another the year after.
“At the time I started to think … I’m either going to be really lucky, because we’ve just had three hundred years of frost and I’ll never have another late frost again, or conditions are changing,” Hobbs says.
He went searching for old climate records for the area, and a friend came across rainfall records held by a Kaniva bank branch dating back to the 1880s. He passed them to Hobbs, who painstakingly plotted the data into spreadsheets, adding his own rainfall totals from 1980 onwards. When he finally transformed the spreadsheets into graphs, he was shocked.
“I thought, it really is drying. It really is,” he says.
“Talking to the old fellows, they talk about how dry it was and how hard it was in previous droughts.”
He could see historical droughts were years with 200-300mm annual rainfall – a low that has become so common he now experiences it three times a decade.
“I could see that there had been quite a significant change in our rainfall,” he says. “From 1990 onwards, I have only ever experienced one above-average rainfall year.”
Temperatures were also changing. Since 1990 there had been a 50 per cent increase in the length of the frost season, extending it from 90 to 138 days from first to last frost, he says. Since 2014, the days of temperatures over 32C have lingered into April, and reappeared by the first days in October, shortening the growing season by weeks.
At the time, Hobbs was managing 60 per cent of the farm as a conventional cropping business and 40 per cent with a set stock of about 1800 sheep. He decided to overhaul his farming practices to make his business more financially and ecologically sustainable. “I’ve got older, my attitude towards risk has changed,” he says. “What I want to do is decrease the volatility of my farm income.”
He reduced his area planted to crops by 50 per cent and instead turned those paddocks over to his sheep, dropping the number of animals to 1500 to reduce erosion and encourage ground cover. He planted native tree shelterbelts and built up perennial pastures. In 2017 he registered 10 per cent of the farm with an emissions reduction fund project, and is working to increase soil carbon before carbon levels are tested again in 2027.
He now focuses on making each sheep more profitable, running fewer so he can de-stock easily before a drought sets in. By closely monitoring weight gain and fertility of his flock, he can both increase productivity and charge a premium for climate-friendly practices.
Although Hobbs hasn’t done a full carbon inventory of the property, he is focusing on making small changes to “meet the challenges of the changing environment”.
He wants the farm in the best condition possible before he passes it on to his two daughters.
DONNA AND JIM WINTER-IRVING
Sheep producers, Nagambie
In central Victoria, Donna and Jim Winter-Irving are working to demonstrate the commercial viability of being good environmental stewards.
Over the past seven years they have transformed their 550-hectare mixed grazing and cropping farm at Nagambie to grazing only, with a focus on boosting the biodiversity and health of their land. They say increased soil carbon and reduced carbon emissions are just some of the benefits that have come from the change.
To the untrained eye, the slow transformation of the property might be hard to see, but for the Winter-Irvings, each new change is something they now pause to take pride in. They have regenerated areas of grey box gumtrees to form shelterbelts and corridors through the property, and converted dams into vegetated wetlands.
Soil that seven years ago was drier now holds more moisture, Donna says. Rain they once lost to run-off soaks into a mat of grass. And a paddock that once bloomed purple with Paterson’s curse grows thick with a diversity of ground cover species.
The decision to change came gradually from a realisation that they wanted to be doing more to nurture the landscape, and that didn’t have to come at a cost to their business.
They gradually “weaned themselves off” synthetic fertilisers and chemicals they used to feed 17 hectares of irrigated lucerne, re-sowing the area with non-irrigated cover crops.
The change brought reduced machinery and input costs, cutting fuel consumption and leaving them with more land to grow diverse grasses and build healthy, carbon-rich soils.
They have turned the business into a grazing enterprise producing wool, mutton and lamb, with a philosophy of “100 per cent ground cover, 100 per cent of the time”.
Each autumn and spring, they assess the seasonal outlook and the amount of grass on the property before deciding whether to adjust the number of animals. On average they keep about 900 breeding ewes, 1000 lambs and 11 heifers, and allow the animals to eat only half to a third of the ground cover, giving the plants “recovery time” between grazing.
Jim says the business has increased its profitability and efficiency. “If you reduce inputs, and your income doesn’t reduce, your profit should be better,” he says.
“We want to be able to demonstrate that by using these principles, you’re going to be profitable. It’s not a lifestyle. These are real products,” he says.
They also want to make it attractive for the next generation by showing the business is sustainable.
“It’s all about income diversity for farmers, and encouraging new practices, and being rewarded for being good stewards of the land,” he says.
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