The shift towards carbon neutral isn't going away

A dozen calculators can estimate the carbon emissions of a farm and they all give different results.

There are hundreds of 'experts' on the topic and you can attend five sustainability talks and they will all give you a range of advice that isn't compatible.

But sadly, the shift towards carbon neutral isn't something that will go away if we just choose to ignore it - many different experts ranging from Australia and New Zealand head of food, beverage and agriculture Michael Whitehead to Farmanco farm management consultant Stacey Bell-Crookes deliver the same message - the dawn of sustainability is coming whether we like it or not.

The European Union is taking its carbon emissions responsibility extremely seriously, no matter the impact on conventional farming.

This is likely to create a domino effect of other countries implementing restrictions, or alternatively, competitors that sell to the EU - such as America and Canada - seeking less restrictive markets creating more competition.

To continue trading in international markets with increased requirements, and improve access to future potential markets, it is essential carbon emissions are taken seriously.

Essentially, either jump on board the carbon train, or be left behind.

Big businesses are already making the shift, with CSBP entering to market with Urea Sustain - an attempt at a more carbon neutral fertiliser, with less nitrogen loss.

CBH has undertaken similar market adjustments, with a target to reduce emissions released directly and indirectly by CBH by 50 per cent by 2030.

It has also adopted the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) program in 2010, allowing growers to sell sustainably certified canola to Europe with CBH.

Its sustainably certified grain program has provided more than $500 million of additional value to Western Australia growers in the past 12 years through increased market access.

With the large agriculture players realising the importance of a pivot to stay competitive in overseas markets, it's natural farmers will see value too.

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Ms Bell-Crookes said she firmly believed carbon emission restrictions were going to creep slowly into the market, so there wouldn't be one drastic change, but to avoid any future shock farmers had to adjust to subtle changes over time.

"If we don't pick it up and embrace it, it's going to be forced on us," Ms Bell-Crookes said.

"And when it's forced on us, it's going to be in ways that don't suit our farming system.

"Whereas if we can build up the information base now and show we are producing our grain for lower emissions, that's going to help us."

One of the biggest myths in the industry is that lower carbon emissions equals lower farm income.

The myth is slowly getting debunked, according to Ms Bell-Crookes, but has created wide-spread fear and a general begrudgement of any carbon chatter.

In a recent study by Farmanco, the top 10 lowest farms in whole of business emissions (measured in kilograms of CO2 emissions per hectare) had a return on assets managed (ROAM) ranging from about 3pc to 31pc.

This shows that low emissions doesn't directly create a low ROAM.

"There has been a misconception, because it's been a fear for a long time," Ms Bell-Crookes said.

"For growers, they're looking at it and going what happens if I make these changes and my profitability reduces, and then I'm losing this money?"

Given the upfront costs to create changes in an operation so that low emissions are achievable, the fear is understandable.

Ms Bell-Crookes said a common mistake was farmers started making changes to their business to reduce emissions without creating a benchmark of where the farm sat.

"Before you make any changes at all, do your measurements first and know what they're emitting because then they can look at your emissions and see where you can make these reductions," she said.

Using products more efficiently is a major way to reduce emissions, so farmers are spending potentially less to produce the same amount - or alternatively the same inputs to produce more.

A lot of work is already being done in this field, with targeted weed control and spraying techniques.

Ms Bell-Crookes said a common fear farmers had was that legislation will focus on the total amount of emissions their farm produces.

But Ms Bell-Crookes said this wasn't the case - there will not be a blanket restriction on the kilograms of CO2 a farm can produce - and farmers won't be subject to just one measure.

"If you've got a 1000ha farm and a 10,000ha farm, you can't be expecting those two farms to be producing the same amount of emissions," she said.

"They've got different areas to manage, different enterprises that could be in different rainfall zones."

In her research, Ms Bell-Crookes used the Greenhouse Accounting Framework from the University of Melbourne and created the largest dataset of WA farm businesses analysed for their greenhouse gas emission outputs.

To ensure the study was fair regardless of whether farms were farming livestock or grains, Ms Bell-Crookes created a ranking system that ranked farms on different measures, such as emission per hectare of cropping or per head of livestock, and created an average from those figures.

"So within the data itself, I can pull out the lowest cropping emitter and the lowest livestock emitter," Ms Bell-Crookes said.

A key finding, which has been the subject of speculation among researchers, was that CO2 emissions were completely unrelated to rainfall.

With every other production measure on a farm linked to rainfall, Ms Bell-Crookes had wondered if the same was true for emissions.

"We were interested to see if we could see if there was a correlation between the amount of rainfall received in millimetres and the amount of emissions produced on a per hectare basis," she said.

"There was just no pattern at all - it's like somebody grabbed a handful of dots and threw it and it just landed in a blob.

"You couldn't even identify where low, medium and high rainfall events were.

"That was a real surprise."