Growing Carbon Farming Demonstration Pilot

Today we're at Mount Schanck for a carbon demonstration day.

And we're really looking forward to a great day of learning to really understand what's going on with the market and the supply chain and the opportunities around carbon.

Farming businesses have these new expectations coming upon them, and that's partly driven by the market.

Also, other investors, like banks and so on, they're taking more and more interest in the sustainability credentials of farms, and part of that is carbon.

And that's happening across all industries,  all sectors, globally in the world, whether you're ag, mining, manufacturing, services, education, this is happening everywhere.

As producers, you always gotta remember there's only one person that puts money into the top of supply chain.

Who's that? The final consumer, exactly.

So if we are not producing a product that those people will buy, we're not in the game.

Here at Mount Schanck, we've spent the last 12 months developing a carbon baseline.

And that's primarily about assessing the emissions that occur on the property, the emissions from the livestock, and then in addition, the emissions from farm, machinery operations, fauna cropping, etc, on farm.

Beyond the baseline, we're looking at options to reduce emissions, and that's where we pull in opportunities around soil and trees.

So Mount Schanck's about 10,000 acres, of that's about 2,000 acres irrigated.

We're a mixed grazing property running about 2 and a half thousand breeding cows  and about 10,000 composite sheep.

Climate, we're about 650 mm rainfall on average, of that's about 400 mm in our growing season.

So, the carbon project we've undertaken here at Mount Schanck involves a tree planting shelterbelt program, which is identifying areas that we wanted to increase our shelter and trees.

And our soil project, we identified our lowest performing areas and with a view of trying to increase our carbon capturing, but also areas that we can improve our production on.

We run a program, AgriWebb, and it tracks all our stock movements.

So we know how many DSE days those paddocks have run, how many stock they've run, how many kilograms of weight gain we've done per hectare, per paddock, per pivot, whatever we wanna break it down into.

And then we identified from there our worst ones, and what we could do to improve those.

We're actually looking to assess the paddocks in the farm that may have the lowest level of carbon and the most opportunity to improve that.

I like to think about that like a bucket. We want a big bucket, but not very full to start with, and an opportunity to fill it up, which means adding more soil carbon.

We identified a couple of ways we're gonna go about it. And one is improving pastures, which is just a perennial pasture program on some of our annual pastures.

And the other way was using organic fertiliser, so compost and that sort of thing.

So, these were paddocks, this was a block that we purchased and running a very, very low DSE rating, which was about 3–4 DSE per hectare.

So we went in and deep ripped with a bulldozer, and then we rock munched as well. And then after that, we've gone from a very low annual base pasture to now a full, productive perennial pasture.

Within 4 years we've gone from 4 DSE up to about 16 DSE, and taken a lot of work, but we are starting to see the benefits now.

Building carbon in trees is a long-term initiative, and so you need first to assess the whole farm
and not just the carbon side of it. It's gotta fit with the production outcomes that we're seeking.

We're looking first to locate those trees in areas where they'll provide shelter for livestock. Second is around the environmental benefits.

So we've looked for developing corridors of native trees and a mix of species that have a biodiversity benefit, and carbon's really a benefit on top of that.

If we can increase our production and pick up some fundamental gains in terms of lambing or calving or condition scoring or less feeding, I think that's the aim of it from my end.

It is a long process, looking long-term, and generational change, I guess that's the way to look at it.

So we plant around about 2,000 trees on an annual basis for shelterbelts and amenity and stock health.

But now we're beginning to understand there's an end consumer demand for that behaviour.

We supply directly into the EU market, so in the future, that market's gonna ask more of us, and we're already ready for that.

This is coming, so it's great to be able to get our foot in the door and see what a major producer's doing, and how they're going about tackling the issues.

95% of the emissions for the product start here and happen here. That also means that the solutions happen here.

Some of you have got an opportunity in soil, others won't.

Some of you might have planted a heap of trees since the '90s, and you're like, "Well, we've got enough."

Others, you're like, "I bought a new block, and it's got, you know, it's bare, and we want to get into that."

So you've gotta look at it property by property. It's about just tying in carbon outcomes  to the activities that you want to do anyway.

We've all got a lot to do on our plate, and we want to run a productive and profitable farm. We want to feed the world, and that's really job one.

Doing that with lower carbon emissions, that's what we're integrating and building that into that plan.

And that starts with understanding your emissions, understanding your opportunities, and taking the first step.

We bought this property 6 years ago as a backgrounding property for livestock.

We bought it knowing that it needed a lot of work, this property. The soils were basically dead, having nothing done for 20 to 25 years.

So, trying to turn it around to a good pasture base for running cattle.

So this is a really interesting project. We're in a lower rainfall environment around the 300mm rainfall area, on deeper sandy soil.

So location's less than 500mm of rainfall are harder to model out what the potential carbon store is gonna be.

And traditionally, sands are the more challenging soils to store and sequester carbon for a long period of time.

So this project was trying to bring all those elements together that, no, it might not be a textbook soil carbon project location, but can we modify these soils to be more productive, and as a result, lead towards more positive carbon changes?

We did some preliminary soil analysis. So went out, had a look at some of the key areas on the property.

Yes, carbon was low, but also, a lot of the other nutrients were low as well.

So when we looked at that, we thought, "What is the low-hanging fruit here? Or what are the key opportunities here in this landscape?" And that's where we went searching for clay.

We got onto Oli from FarmLab and Ed from Soil & Land Co. We decided to do the 3M soil mapping to find where the clay was underneath to see if we could map it, which has been reasonably accurate.

And then we did the soil core sampling, and then we come into the paddock and clayed it. It took about 3 weeks with 2 clay buckets and the delver.

We have 5,000 hectares, this paddock's 115 hectares. We've spread 80 to 120 tonne of clay to try and help build the soil and put a barley crop in, just to help it settle down over the first year before we run it back to pasture.

So over a 25-year period, we plan to build on that and make it, in the long term, a more productive property.

We've got less than 3% clay in these sands. So if we can get up above around 5 to 10% clay, we can start reducing that non-wetting, so we can start getting water in there.

Then, with that clay, we get some of the potassium, the magnesium, calcium, all sorts can be still stored in that clay as well. So we're bringing some of that nutrition up closer to the top.

I'm hoping that once we get the paddocks with the pasture in and up and going and we just fertilise, put nutrition into 'em, and look after them a bit better that the cost won't be as high, and they'll start to return a bit.

But the first 5 years, I think, is getting through that real heavy input cost, and then hopefully, we'll see it turn around and the soils build and the pasture.

When we came to Hawick, it was pretty quickly apparent that there's extremely good bird biodiversity present on the property.

Threatened species, so they're listed under national and state legislation as being threatened species.

Also, the landscape context of this property with the adjoining Ngarkat Conservation Park and nearby heritage agreement areas means that it's really important as a buffering habitat and a connecting habitat for bird life.

And the reason that's important, in association with the carbon project, is that you can actually get a premium on your carbon price if you can also point to elements of your property management that are supporting biodiversity or improving biodiversity, or where there's existing good biodiversity values.

There are parts of the value chain, buyers, etc, that will be looking for those sort of elements from their producers so that they can point to them and say, "We're working with farmers who have sustainable practices in mind and are providing important value for the broader community in terms of biodiversity protection."

Part of the process of working in a carbon project is actually getting your eyes above the dashboard and starting to think about how you're managing your landscape as a strategy approach.

Carbon is connected to other nutrients that, as we see the carbon building, it means we're actually building our whole nutrient pool as well. So that's a big benefit for the resilience of the landscape.

Soils change slowly, but if we take care of them over the tenure of a project, we should see significant productivity and profitability, which overall provides greater resilience to these properties in this lower rainfall environment.

The soil carbon is an extra benefit, and hopefully, over the 25-year lifespan of the carbon project, it will pay us back financially with the return from selling the carbon credits.

The biggest challenge is to be able to keep the carbon in the soil, keeping a ground cover.

So building a decent pasture, long-term pasture to keep the ground cover on, is the big key to it, to keep the carbon in the soil.

A lot of producers are concerned at the moment about sustainability requirements and carbon requirements, etc.

If you welcome them and you engage with them, as Shane has been doing here at Hawick, then you're well on the path to positioning yourself to take advantage.

To improve your production, improve your system, while also getting a bit of additional income through those carbon and biodiversity lines.

It's something you gotta build on, and it'll take many years, but I wanna see the property turn around and be viable. Yeah. Prove that we can actually do it out here in this low rainfall country.

We recognise, as a relatively large agricultural holding, that we have capacity to not only reduce emissions, but to actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

And one of the approaches that we identified there was soil carbon.

Duxton Apples are an apple producer in South Australia. Two orchard sites, one in the state's southeast in Nangwarry, and the other here in Loxton.

So we produce a variety of apples, around 7,000 tonnes a year, which equates to around 25% of South Australia's apple production depending on the season.

We haven't historically had any strategic approach to managing the noxious weeds in the orchard.

So throughout parts of the year, the weeds would be dominant and through other parts they'd be completely absent, which would leave the soil bare.

Which would create a bunch of issues both for the production trees but also for the general soil health. So, soil biology, soil structure, and water holding capacity.

So what we really wanted to do was implement a more strategic approach to how we manage that floor cover and the species that we introduce there. And have a more holistic approach to the total orchard system.

One way in which we looked to do that is to introduce native species.

We identified a number of species that could be utilised and that wouldn't cause production issues or other issues to productivity, one of those being saltbush.

We also recognise that saltbush are local to this area. They have a wide distribution, but they exist naturally here.

So we knew that they would perform well in the orchard setting, and that they had the specific traits that we were looking for.

One: being able to persist throughout the year and cover the soil and reduce that radiant heat. And the other: being able to create a large mat that didn't get too high and require numerous slashing efforts.

So the other big objective for us was to actually understand what the process is of lodging a carbon project and how that system works.

And through that process, we understood that there's some pretty big challenges in alley crop systems.

One being how we actually map the different management zones. How we manage the under-tree area is completely different to how we manage the mid rows.

Which led us to having to use some drone technology to be able to map those areas to the level of precision required by the regulator.

Yeah, so Duxton's approached us and said, "We'd really like to measure some of the carbon that we think we're sequestering into the apple trees."

And that was really about using LiDAR in 2 modes, both on the drone but also in handheld mode, so that we could scan the trees and convert that known volume of the tree into a bulk density.

–Or look at the bulk densities, and the water content of the tree, and actually convert that into a known amount of tonnes of carbon per tree.

We were able to collaboratively get more information about what's going on below the soil from a carbon sequestration perspective, but also above ground into trees.

That's giving more information about how we're actually sequestering carbon into complementary things.

I mean, the soil's a really critical medium in terms of growing anyway, but getting measurements and data for the first time out of that in a method that's consistent.

For us, it's as much about being able to implement sustainable practices rather than the carbon itself.

Through the potential revenue that will flow through the carbon, it has just allowed us to implement these practices and also through the funding from PIRSA.

Without that, it's really hard to try these sort of more unique approaches to how we manage our systems.

If you're not measuring what it is in the soil, you're not measuring what it is that you're putting into trees and all that sort of thing. Well, you don't have the information.

So you want to be telling that story about, "We've done good stuff," you know, "We've got all this soil carbon building up, we've got all these trees building up." And that's gonna be really vital information.

Where do we sit? Where are the areas that we might need to pay more attention to? Where are the areas that have got opportunity from a carbon neutrality perspective?

Orchard systems by nature are highly derived, so there's only so many things we can do to try and make them more sustainable.

We're always going to need to do slashing, we're always going to need to perform those sort of actions.

And all we can do is look for sustainable approaches where we can minimise those efforts.

Most farmers, when they're in a property, they want to leave it at the end in a lot better state than what they took over. And we are in that process.

We thought Leon was a particularly good candidate for a carbon farming pilot because sandy soils and low rainfall are characteristic of large parts of Australia.

We thought it was really important that that agroecological environment was represented within this program.

We know that it's difficult to build carbon in this environment because there's not much clay in the soils to protect the carbon, and there's not much rainfall to grow biomass to contribute to soil carbon.

But the management changes that this farm's going to make, shifting to rotational grazing, changing the fertilising regime, these are things that give us the best shot, we think, of building soil carbon in this environment.

In taking Seven Winds down a carbon path, we were particularly interested in soil health aspects and getting improved production figures, etc.

But, in doing that, we also have to change our management techniques and some of that is rotating our stock, in this case, sheep, through paddocks, a series of paddocks, over 8 weeks.

A paddock is occupied once, and then it sits vacant for 7 weeks.

But we're also looking in dry years, which we expect to be 3 in 10, we'll pull the sheep back into contained areas and almost hand-feed them for the mid-late summer period.

That will stop the paddock thatch being destroyed. In doing that we can, not only maintain soil moisture, but we can also have the soil profile a bit cooler.

And this helps the bugs and organisms and fungi that's in that top layer survive through summer. And give us a lot better position for cropping and grazing, and, if you want, other things as well.

We have got some natural resources on these farms that perhaps others don't have, and that's chicken litter, which will be one of our main strategies of getting our soil organic matter into a much better ratio.

Another part of the carbon strategy is to change our tilling practices.

Traditionally, like a lot of Mallee farms, we have tilled here. Not overly heavily, but we have tilled.

And now, that will be pulled back with air seeding, and that should help build up the soil organic matter more quickly.

By growing more organic matter and feeding more organic matter into the soil, there's a greater nutrient holding capacity in the soil.

There's also a greater moisture holding capacity in the soil.

So all those things, we think, will help build soil productivity and any soil carbon sequestration that we see will be a bonus.

In the first few years, there are a lot of changes you have to do.

They have come at a fair cost. But we think they'll be offset more so in production rather than in actual carbon credits, because they will come slowly and they're not necessarily a pot of gold.

And if we can get, say, 25 to 30% production benefits over a period, and we can reach that by year 10 of the 25-year period, then we should be going quite well.

But it will also give us this entry point into the markets too. Making sure the consumer can actually see that you are actually trying to do something about the environment and leave the farm in a better condition.

This year has been one of the heaviest winter droughts in South Australia, particularly in this area.

It makes farming very difficult. And we are hoping by this new method that some of those droughts, or dry years, we can pull the impacts of them from being catastrophic to being tolerable.

Maintain our breeding flocks and so forth at the same level, so that we don't have a heavy yo-yo effect on our farm production.

My aim, for to coming to Charlie was, it's a good opportunity to learn a bit more about carbon.

It's not about the money, it's about the, if we can incorporate it, that's all truly a bonus.

But it's to raise production and to give everyone a chance in the Southeast to have someone to come and say, "Hey, well what did they do? Did it work or did it fail?"

So that's why we are here today.

My name's Charlie Bainger and this particular block is called Hillcrest, it's 740 hectares.

Average rainfall is supposedly around 24 inches.

And normally we run a trade steer operation on this block.

We know that in ag in general, that we have emissions.

In this particular property, in a cattle operation, we've worked out what those emissions are.

What we're trying to achieve through an ACCU Project is to say, "Ok, we've got emissions, but now we know that we can also grow carbon".

So it's about trying to balance the emissions with the sequestration to get to, well, carbon neutral as a start. And certainly the opportunity to get to carbon positive.

The main things when we were setting the project up, we talked about were, I guess, setting the baseline.

Because it was all new to me, I didn't really understand how any of it would work.

So just understanding that there's a baseline in your pastures of carbon that exists already and that's the point of the project we're at at the moment.

And then getting our head around how we can make improvements in the future.

The key practice change is gonna be intensification of grazing.

So, looking at mob sizes and paddock rotations through the lens of best practice, which you know, Hillcrest already does.

Cut large paddocks down into smaller hectarage, so the pasture usage is more efficient. And then the pasture should be actively growing for more months of the year and therefore sequester more carbon for longer.

And on this particular block, we've tried to start going down the path, or make the change, of adding more clovers or more legumes to our re-pasture mixes.

Because the clovers will add more nitrogen, which will feed the pastures.

While the plants and the pastures are growing, whilst they're also growing up, they're also growing down.

And whilst that root biomass is increasing below ground, that's where the carbon sequestration takes place.

I can see what he's looking for straight away, as you all know he's trying to chase the organic matter and what it is, and he's found it.

First, we need to have the lotting plan and the boundary of the project.

And we have to exclude the area where we cannot do the practice change. And we have to maintain the area where we can't do practice change.

But we need to maintain those existing vegetation and other, the carbon related stuff.

And then outside that, within the paddock we have to make the clear area, boundary of the area to apply for practice change, which we call the Carbon Estimation Area.

As a region, I think this is certainly prospective for soil carbon.

There are some constraints with soil. This calcareous layer at 40 centimetres, we just push through it for the most part.

Not so much in this project, but one of the other things we identified in terms of a potential practice change were some amelioration activities.

There's been some work done around here, essentially trying to crack that calcareous layer to allow water and roots to penetrate.

That's something that we could certainly look at in the future as we progress.

We know that this is a productive area. It's just about making sure that we can sequester the carbon in these soils, which we know we can.

Biggest learnings to this point?

Well, I guess just starting off really primitively. I didn't even understand or really know that pastures sequestered carbon in the first place.

I was more thinking along the lines of just trees did.

And how we can try and make an improvement on our baseline so we will hopefully sit in carbon credit territory, not in carbon deficit.

It costs a lot of money to re-pasture paddocks.

It's all good and well just to say, "Oh yeah, they look nice".

But by actually having the data there, we can see if we are getting more days of grazing on those hectares that have been re-pastured than others that haven't. So that part's really important.

The whole idea is to be able to layer a range of different carbon farming methods over a lot and plan, so you get the most benefit.

As well as keeping it agricultural. I think that's one of the real focuses for Elders.

We do lots of these things on farm anyway through best practice management.

So, if we can capture and measure that and put it into a framework to add value on the farm, well, that's what we're here for.

The carbon farming market is a really unique space, and carbon farming is evolving at a rapid rate.

When looking at our enterprises with a carbon lens, or a natural capital lens, does that change how we manage these landscapes? Can it make it more profitable? Can it make it so that the farming systems here are productive, and sustainable into the future?

My name's Tim Luckraft and I farm with my wife Christy and four children in the Orroroo district.

We chose to focus on our Ridgeview property for the carbon project, which is 4,000 acres of mixed farming.

Soils here at Ridgeview are heavy clay sodic soils.

And, combined with variable rainfall, makes it quite hard to establish crops.

The variability is quite extreme.

When it's good, it's really good, but when it's bad, we might go through four years of not generating any income.

So, focusing on a more grazing based business, we're hoping to just iron out our income stream a little bit.

The property here at Luckraft's is representative of a large area across our landscape.

Saltbush and blue bush dominant ecosystems with Acacia Victoriae have a high diversity of plant species, a really high diversity of bird species in comparison to a lot of the landscape around us.

So they have a really vital part to play in our ecosystem health.

But they also play a really important part in our production systems.

Because of the diversity of species, they have a high value as a feed source, particularly if managed well.

And so, if we can manage these landscapes to retain the palatable species, or to reestablish the palatable species, then we can significantly increase the production capacity of these sites.

We built a set of containment yards at Ridgeview to hold all the sheep in dry times.

Help put a bit of extra weight on lambs if need be, if we can't finish 'em in the paddock.

And unfortunately since 20we've had to use it every year.

What the carbon project has highlighted, it shows that there would be a big benefit from rotational grazing in this environment.

Our current grazing practices at Ridgeview are set stocking.

The sheep just target the most palatable species first and graze them out.

What Christy and I are trying to achieve here is to fence the property up into more manageable sized paddocks so we can control the grazing pressure better.

Perennial shrubs and grasses actually do quite well here, so we're hoping to increase the perennial pasture base to utilise rainfall better and to give the sheep a more diverse choice of pasture to graze.

We currently have a 30 hectare paddock that's been direct seeded and fenced off from livestock.

That's been fenced off for two years, and the results in that paddock are looking really promising.

The aim being to put some species back into this landscape that have been lost from past management, and improve the productivity and profitability of this grazing enterprise, while also bolstering the natural capital of this site.

By increasing the ground cover, we also work to increase the soil carbon.

And that was one of the things that was flagged through this investigation, that the soil carbon in this site is significantly lower than the region average.

So there is quite a lot of potential there to increase that soil carbon and therefore increase the water holding capacity, the ability for species to be more resilient in drier periods, and ultimately improve the carbon account for this site as well.

So there's been lots of studies that have shown that having additional vegetation on farm will give you benefits in the form of ecosystem services.

That's things like wind breaks, predatory services that are given by birds and insects to pests, things like pollination of crops.

Landowners often think that more trees means that there will be less water available for things such as pastures and crops.

What studies have found is that in the near vicinity of trees, there's often a small area where pastures, etc, won't grow as well.

But then there's a larger area beyond 1 where, because of the shelter that's given by the trees, 1 soil moisture stays in the soil for longer, 1 and you get better growth of pasture and crops in that zone.

1 We also lease my family's property off my dad.

1 That property's actually fairly special to me 1 because it's where my interest in wildlife first started.

1 I remember doing water runs with my dad 1 and spending most of the time counting bird nests.

1 Now, when I'm taking my own kids on water runs, 1 they're always getting me to stop and look at bird nests, 1 and watching my own kids do the same thing now 1 gives me great satisfaction 1 that they share the same interests.

1 Something that we've learned from working 1 with producers in low rainfall areas is you 1 can still build a project that is worthwhile, 1 in terms of the carbon revenue, 1 and also the benefits it gives in terms of your production.

1 When you add these two things together, 1 it can definitely make a viable project for owners 1 of land in low rainfall areas.

1 For us, if we could establish a property 1 that provides a growing habitat for our native birds 1 and wildlife, and provides good shelter for our livestock, 1 then that would be a great result for us.