On-Farm Emissions Action Plan Pilot

Julian Carroll:

We're in Mudgegonga, which is in Northeast Victoria. We're on a commercial self-replacing beef enterprise. We mainly produce feeder steers.

Brad Costin:

So Agriculture Victoria has set up the On-Farm Emissions Action Plan Pilot to help producers understand their emissions on their farm, and then also helping them act upon that number as well.

Julian Carroll:

We are motivated to get involved in the On-Farm Emissions Action Plan Pilot because we are really interested in this conversation around on-farm carbon. We think it's important to understand our own carbon footprint or our emissions intensity as part of our risk mitigation strategy, and also because we think there's going to be a marketing component to it in the coming years.

Brad Costin:

Julian and other farmers are helping provide us with feedback and how we can better improve the process for farmers to understand their emissions profile.

Julian Carroll:

I think the biggest surprise for us and probably for most people is just how much enteric emissions, the methane that comes from our cattle digesting grass contributes to our footprint.

Brad Costin:

The Pilot is that we want farmers to know their number and learn about their number, what goes into it, and helping them act what practical things on farm they can do to help lower their agricultural emissions.

Julian Carroll:

I think going into the analysis, I expected that there would be a number of sources that we could potentially work on to improve our carbon use efficiency to see that 80% of it was all about enteric emissions, and that's a number that's going to be consistent with most beef producers. It pretty clearly sharpens your focus onto your animal production. Productivity and reducing your carbon emissions are intrinsically linked, and so for us, thinking about how we can be the most productive we can with our cattle, we think strongly about our genetics, about our nutrition, and about our monitoring.

So thinking about genetics, it's important that we're choosing bulls that align with our breeding objective, and we're also using some relatively new technology for genomics analysis of our commercial breeders so we can get some insight into those females and into traits that are otherwise invisible. From the monitoring perspective, we've got an Optiweigh system in the paddock now, so we can really keep a close eye on our animal performance, especially our young animals as they're growing. So to address nutrition and specifically growth rates in young cattle, we've decided to upgrade our feeding systems in our stock containment areas.

Brad Costin:

Each farm is very different in the way that its emissions and it's also its ability to sequester carbon, so it's a very much an individual thing, so that's where sitting down and understanding livestock inventory and the area that you've got to trees and the age of those trees is really important.

Julian Carroll:

We already have quite a large area of trees on our farm and trees being our primary opportunity to sequester carbon. Our tree area is about 17% of our total acres, but our tree age is really young, so they're not going to hit their straps for another 10 years or so. We'll see our sequestered carbon lift from about 70 tons to 270 tons by 2030.

Brad Costin:

It might seem overwhelming or very complicated to understand your emissions, but there are some very easy to use tools and calculators out there that can help.

Julian Carroll:

Getting across your carbon footprint is a really valuable exercise. I think it's important that you need to know your number and how you compare to your peers. And I'd also recommend people consider combining it with business benchmarking, which you can do with the Victorian Livestock Farm Monitor Project.

Speaker 3:

Authorised by the Victorian Government, 1 Treasury Place, Melbourne.