Grower Group Alliance's Forum23 focuses on personal and industry development

Held at Joondalup Resort last Friday, the forum offered a full day of speakers, who shared their knowledge.

The day started with a focus on big challenges, first hearing from Hanabeth Luke, senior lecturer from Southern Cross University in New South Wales, who shared information on resilience thinking.

Dr Luke explained the seven principles in the resilience thinking framework, developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The principles include concepts such as maintaining diversity or "not putting all your eggs in one basket", encouraging new learning, having well connected systems and minimising small variables and problems where possible.

They were explained within the context of the Resilience Centre's planetary boundaries, which are nine environmental areas which can be developed.

Following on the theme of personal development, Zoe Arden, from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, England, spoke via video call about what mental shifts need to take place to unlock new knowledge in the industry.

Ms Arden spoke about embracing different ways of thinking between the agricultural sectors to solve some of the biggest challenges affecting the State.

The morning session closed with a panel discussion including Dr Luke and Ms Arden, as well as Ben Biddulph, from the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development and Tanya Kilminster and Kallista Bolton, from GGA.

Richard Brake, Richard Brake Consulting, explained the ins and outs of natural capital accounting, what it means onfarm and how it relates to global financial markets and policy.

Mr Brake explained that as consumers were increasingly demanding transparency for sustainability, it's never been more important to understand your farm's natural assets.

"The consumer, at the end of the day, is the only person who puts a dollar into our system," Mr Brake said.

"How they think and what they perceive as right or wrong is entirely up to them, because they are able to pay what they want, for the product they want, however it is reared, raised or grown."

In evaluating environmental assets, farmers and landholders can also aim to mitigate the effects of climate change on their land at an individual level.

Trevor Lucas, CBH Group, shared some of the company's sustainability goals, which includes minimising carbon emissions during shipping.

There was also a panel session, featuring West Midlands Group executive officer Nathan Craig, Agzero2023 chairman Simon Wallwork and David Ward, Farmanco, where the speakers discussed their sustainability goals.

The afternoon's agenda revolved around the South West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub and the projects that have come out of it.

GGA's Mark Holland emphasised the importance of dam reliability, especially with uncertainty on live export.

Mr Holland said the years between 2018-2020 were difficult and that live export got a lot of farmers out of hot water.

Nik Callow, WaterSmart Dams, said developments in the agtech space had neglected water innovation, but there were tools to optimise catchments, prevent leakage or evaporation and improve water quality.

"We're looking at fit for purpose water and making sure that if you're using Rolls Royce sprays and spray equipment, then you've got to put Rolls Royce quality water into the system or it falls over, we've learnt that quite powerfully," Mr Callow said.

He mentioned research on subsurface water harvesting, which would "harvest" water from water-logged paddocks to use elsewhere.

"We've got some monitoring work happening down at Kojonup," Mr Callow said.

"The idea here is can we de-water these water-logged areas and can we increase traffic?

"But also asking can we harvest this as a valuable resource?

"We're looking forward to reporting on that soon."

The event concluded with a discussion about the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act and the new WA Agricultural Research Collaboration, where it was announced that Facey Group chief executive officer Kelly Pearce would be the first director of the project.