What's in the budget for sustainable agriculture?

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, Murray Watt, has announced a $63.8 million budget for sustainable agriculture while speaking at the Australian Sustainable Agriculture Summit in Toowoomba. This funding addresses crucial issues raised by farmers and stakeholders, particularly by investing in new technologies to reduce GHG emissions as well as research and initiatives to measure, monitor and report these reductions over time.

"It’s one thing to go and do things on farm, but what you want to be able to do is show what improvement is made, measure your carbon reduction, be able to take it to the bank, be able to take it to an insurer, be able to take it to a purchaser of your product and demonstrate the action that you’ve taken," Murray Watt.

Consistent and transparent carbon measurement is vital for farmers to demonstrate their environmental impact, secure financial support, and market their products effectively, but there's plenty of gaps in the agrifood supply chain that make this challenging. Our LCAgMetrics project with AgriFutures aims to tackle the issue of data availability and supply chain transparancy, at the very core. 

This project, “Equipping Australian agriculture with sustainability metrics project” (LCAgMetrics), is led by AgriFutures and is part of a suite of projects being funded by the Federal Government’s Sustainability Reporting Uplift Grant Round. It will enable better availability and interoperability of data along agrifood supply chains to support the reporting and traceability of sustainability credentials.

This budget is a promising step in ensuring that the agriculture sector remains profitable, productive, and sustainable for the long term.