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the australian farmer
drones to measure density and did sampling of a whole bunch – literally going in and measuring the size of the trees. Based on those measures, they were able to say, “On that size tree over that period of time, that's what would have been sequestered.” We have a lot of sampling, so there wasn’t a lot of averaging on our property, but of course that’s an option, because on our land alone there are 700,000 trees – so you’re not going to measure them all in- dividually. We had a lot of databases and did random tran- sects, choosing sites off the map – so we didn't go choose your juicy spots or something; we chose what was there and then duplicated it through. That's a challenge for your average producer, though – measuring all of their trees. TAF: How can other producers achieve the same kind of result and should they want to? MW: The MLA has just put out a new tool, which is much better than the ones we started with. So in that context, what you do is you say, “This is the amount of country you have – soil type, your rain- fall, and the type of trees you put in - and that will give you an average of what those trees should do.” It gives you a pretty good rule of thumb for working out your carbon capture, and that's not that hard to do. If you want to go to the next level, then ob- viously you'd have to engage third parties to do the measurement. TAF: What are consumers actually looking for when it comes to farmers being environmentally friendly? MW: So there's two things going on here – there's what they say they want and what they’re actually prepared to spend on, and they’re not always the same, but in our context, at this stage, we're in a quite boutique market of Coles carbon-neutral beef, ZQ, ReGen - it all goes into those North Amer- ican Sports markets. And so they're quite special- ist and those people, I think they're motivated and they’re talking to the people who come through, the intermediaries for these ones; they say, not all consumers are one voice. Some people are doing
of pasture. That way, we could match our demand curve - so when the ewe or the cow was lactating, we had feed in front of them. That's management stuff. With that, we created a really carbon efficient operation without using the trees. But then to solve that problem, we had to use the offsets in the trees - or in our context, insets. The lan- guage around it gets a bit messy - your offsets could be sold to third parties or you can keep them to yourself or your own system, which is what we've done. We've never sold to third parties. TAF: How did you measure the sequestration into the trees, and therefore know that you’d reached saturation? MW: The University of Melbourne came up with a forestry team, and they did a number of things. Initially, they do a sort of Google Map analysis to plot the location of the trees, and then they go out and measure them. On top of that, they brought up
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