A PANEL discussion was held on the first day of evokeAG. 2024 at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre on the social, regulatory and environmental pressures mounting on the food supply chain to reduce gas emissions.
The lively discussion, which ended with an audience Q&A, was facilitated by AuctionsPlus head of content, Jackson Hewett.
He was joined onstage by Kerridge Farm director and steering committee member, Jacqui Biddulph, co-founder and chief executive officer of Rumin8, David Messina, Global Sustainability director Charlotte Weston, and University of Melbourne, Victoria, professor Richard Eckard.
Mr Hewett set the stage by mentioning the European Union removing mention from its emissions reduction draft that farmers have to reduce emissions by 30 per cent, following a series of protests.
The discussion then started in earnest with Mr Hewett shooting professor Eckhard a question regarding where Australia's emission reductions sit in comparison to the rest of the world.
"There's no sector that has the same emissions profile," professor Eckhard said.
"But we know a few things: with beef production, as you go from Tasmania up to the Northern Territory, the number changes, because, well, the challenge changes.
"We have worked with some of the major banks to do some baseline assessments across regions and we feel like we're getting there."
Ms Weston took a broader view, saying countries around the globe were behind schedule on meeting the Paris Agreement.
"More needs to be done to really accelerate the transition both from a sustainable finance perspective but also what countries are doing in terms of policy, action," Ms Weston said.
She honed in on how Australia's sustainability practices were faring on the world stage.
"There have been some recent shifts from voluntary reporting to mandatory reporting, and one of those big shifts is the adoption of the ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board) - Australia is due to be one of the early adopters of that this year," she said.
"The second thing is the amount of research and development tech and innovation - there's lots of exciting things happening."
Ms Biddulph chimed in with the latest innovations at her dairy farm, Kerridge Farm, which has been measuring its carbon footprint for six years.
"We've invested in technology, we have energy recovery systems in our dairy, 95pc of our stock water usage is solar," Ms Biddulph said.
"If you're an efficient producer of anything, if you can turn out product per unit of resource you're putting into it, you will have a lower carbon number."
Mr Messina said there was no silver bullet technology to simplify the complex execution of emission reductions, given that different lands have different needs.
"We've been spending the last few years deep in RND at Rumin8," Mr Messina said.
However, pulling all three tenets of cost-effectiveness, palatability, and efficacy into one piece of tech that will reduce methane numbers has not been a simple matter, he added.
"We have our granule product which goes onto a solar or mineral related product, and our target there is 85pc reduction and we're seeing that pretty consistently," Mr Messina said.
"With our water product, we're slightly further behind, but it goes into a water trough, and our target there is 45pc."
The panel then fielded a few questions from the audience.
Mr Hewett directed the first question toward Ms Biddulph.
"A lot of information that different companies have been asking from farmers regarding emissions, biodiversity, soil," he said.
"How do we best manage data sharing privacy?"
Ms Biddulp said it was difficult to answer, but it was a circumstance that put growers in a box.
"We've got information that producers are going to need to fulfill their financial reporting obligations, and we've got information they'd like to access, so there's a bit of quid pro quo here about how we can share that data," Ms Biddulph said.
Mr Hewett said much has been discussed about all the reporting burdens that get put upon a farmer, and that corporate farms have the capacity to fill those reports while family farms are squeezed out.
"I can remember the same thing being said about GST," Ms Biddulph said.
"We were never going to have any time to milk cows because we were going to be that busy.
"But now we don't even think about GST, we just do it.
"I'm just looking at my industry and thinking, 'right guys, if you want us to be part of the solution, you need to give us the tools, the courses'," she said.
Ms Biddulp added that family farms are still the backbone of this country.
"One of the reasons is we're believers in generational wealth - we'll work really hard when we're young for perhaps not a lot of money, but what we're doing is stacking away our investment to be harvested at another date and passed on," she said.
Professor Eckhard then spoke on the democratisation of reporting tools.
"The biggest win we had was discovering the dairy industry's data base already asks all the questions to complete the (carbon) calculator, so whether you want it or not, you get the number," professor Eckhard said.
"That was quite a win because it freed up a lot of data entry."
