A new report by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has found there is a growing suite of promising options already available to reduce on-farm emissions and further opportunities for practical solutions for Australian producers.
The Priorities for Low Emissions Agricultural Solutions Investment report looked at current and emerging tools to reduce the on-farm greenhouse gas emissions of the Australian agricultural sector, and what was needed to deliver practical impact.
The national assessment looked at more than 80 emissions-reduction technologies across six sectors: red meat and sheep, dairy, cropping, horticulture, pigs and poultry.
These technologies span specific interventions such as feed-supplements, to broad enabling activities like precision agriculture, and it considers well demonstrated technologies like biomass digestors to emerging technologies like anti-methonogenic livestock vaccines.
It identifies investment priorities across three horizons – now to 2030, 2030 to 2035, and beyond 2035 – to help industry, government and research organisations target investment and effort where it can make the greatest difference.
CSIRO funded and delivered the work with support from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. More than 80 experts across rural research and development corporations, state and territory government agriculture agencies, universities and industry contributed to the assessment through workshops, interviews and review.
“There is no single technology that will deliver lower-emissions agriculture across Australia’s diverse farming systems”, said Dr Peat Leith, a Team Leader in CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food research unit and joint lead author of the report.
“What this report shows is that we have a growing range of promising options, but different combinations will be needed for different industries and production systems.”
Dr Leith said the report outlines the opportunity to build the measurement systems, incentives, capability and coordination needed to turn that potential into real-world impact.
“What this looks like differs from one sector to the next, but there are common patterns and priorities, and there is real opportunity for agriculture to work across industries and with the energy sector to make significant strides,” he said.
The report found that technical performance of the emissions reduction options alone is a poor predictor of whether farmers will adopt a technology and that cost, return on investment, ease of use, delivery, trusted data and market value all shaped uptake significantly.
CSIRO’s Dr Michael Battaglia , joint lead author of the report, said research has created a growing supply of potential solutions.
“The next challenge is to make sure those solutions are practical, commercially attractive and valued by the markets they serve, so there is a reason for producers to adopt them,” Dr Battaglia said.
“For producers, reducing emissions cannot be separated from running productive and profitable farming businesses. The strongest pathways are those that bring those objectives together.”
He said to achieve substantially lower emissions production, the sector would likely need combinations, or “stacks”, of technologies and practices suited to particular farming systems.
“Continued development of Australia’s monitoring, reporting and verification systems will be important as demand for lower-emissions production grows,” he said.
“Building on work already underway can make it easier for farmers to demonstrate emissions outcomes and access markets that value them.”
While the authors expect emissions reductions to be modest in the near term, they say early work will build the foundations for more significant contributions in the medium term by growing the confidence, capability and coordination needed for technologies to scale and achieve widespread adoption into the future.
The report complements significant work and investment already underway across rural research and development corporations, state and Australian governments, industry organisations and the Zero Net Emissions Agriculture Cooperative Research Centre.
