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INNOVATION IN PRACTICE
market is still totally voluntary. However, if you want to understand what your carbon footprint is and try to get that down, you'll need to make sure that you keep your carbon credits that you could produce for yourself and not sell them off to another Santos or Rio Tinto who wants to use them for their own prod- ucts. So this is the battle. There’s only going to be a lim- ited ability for the Australian landscape to seques- ter carbon. In agriculture, in my view, we’ll need as much of that as possible, because we won’t be able to do it permanently. These parties that are com- ing now and buying these large swaths of land or going onto other people's farms and paying them to change their methodology, whatever they're doing to get their carbon credits – those people will not be able to use it for their own product, because they’ve already sold it. The problem also is is they may have a covenant sitting on their own property title, to say that they've sold it. So someone in the future can’t come and buy that farm and do the same thing. TAF: Does that affect the future resale value? MW: It could, yes. That's the second half of your question: what are the repercussions financially? At the moment, you can take the money and run for 25 to 100 years depending on what scheme you sign up to, and you've got that in your pocket, but later on when you want to keep farming and selling food or fibre, you won't be able to do that again. That’s the challenge for the ag industry. TAF: Is it possible to improve processes, increase productivity on the farm, and increase financial viability without adding to carbon emissions? MW: Yes, I think it is. I think you do best practice - and the best practice, relative to what we're doing at the moment, is that you control your controllables. That means you focus on doing the most efficient genetics you can for your product. For lambing, you want a ro- bust animal that takes less to feed and produces more lambs and mothers well. For beef, it’s not dissimilar. It's about genetics, combined with the work being done now on feed conversion - so an animal which eats less to produce the same amount of weight gain
it for animal welfare reasons. Some are doing it for biodiversity reasons and some are doing it for car- bon reasons and some are doing it for all of those reasons. The challenge is, how do you unpack that when someone's purchasing a product somewhere? And someone might just like the packaging. The ul- timate test of that is are they prepared to pay? So where's the price point where they're prepared to pay for those things? The producers of the product for the consumers under the Science-Based Target Initiative who are signing up to that - basically saying we're going to keep the planet under 1.5 degrees warming - they’re the most important thing for farmers, because that's who's gonna be buying our product. TAF: What’s the difference between transitional soil carbon and proper soil carbon? MW: There are two key considerations when you're doing any insetting or offsetting: what you do has to be additional - something that you wouldn't have done anyway - and it's got to be permanent. Transitional soil carbon ebbs and flows – let’s say we have a high rainfall event and lots of vegetation growth. When that vegetation breaks down and de- composes, soil carbon will be very high. But then we have a drying event, or we overgraze it or something, we will lose that soil carbon, so that's transitional. In terms of proper, it’s permanent soil carbon. So you've had a permanent change in terms of what you're doing. That's the challenge be- cause a lot of these figures that have come through - and there was one last weekend, someone selling carbon neutral heifers and steers in northern New South Wales - the problem with that is he had one year of data. You need at least five years of data to say you have actually had the shift. And that's the problem. In defence of everyone who’s doing it, it’s all new. I'm not having a go at anyone who does it. You just have to learn the space a bit better. TAF: What do farmers need to know about the fu- ture of carbon credits? MW: There's going to be no price on carbon for agri- culture, as far as I can see, going forward, and the
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