Is carbon Landcare's missing link?

Ockham's Razor – ABC Radio National
Broadcast: Sunday 25 March 2012 9:45AM

Robyn Williams: Today, once more we shall celebrate the 25th anniversary of Landcare. Carrie Tiffany mentioned it last week: a movement that recognised that those actually living on the land, the farmers and their families, can know as much as any expert about how to look after it.

And now, 25 years on, the word ‘bipartisan’ is completely forgotten and even dreaded. It is astonishing to recall that Landcare was born when the boss of the National Farmers Federation, Rick Farley, and a conservationist, Phillip Toyne, joined forces. Impossible to imagine isn’t it? Like Tony having dinner with Julia. Well, Rick Farley died a while ago, but Phillip Toyne is still with us and going strong. And here he reflects on what was achieved and what next:

Phillip Toyne: When the late Rick Farley, then Executive Director of the National Farmers’ Federation and I, the Head of the Australian Conservation Foundation, won support from the Hawke Government for a Decade of Landcare, the year was 1990.  It required the harnessing of effort by farmers, environmentalists and all levels of government to transform the way the land was used – to create a new paradigm – farmers would be eligible for huge increases in land remediation funding but would have to commit to planning and using their lands in a truly sustainable way.

When reviewing what was achieved in the ensuing ten years Rick and I concluded that:

In retrospect, the goal of Landcare to achieve Ecologically Sustainable Development on all properties in ten years was hopelessly optimistic. This is all the more so given that the goals that we had in mind expanded with the addition of Coastcare and Rivercare.  The Department of Agriculture even introduced Fishcare to the growing list of care products.
It was more of a philosophical statement than a target.  There was no way that Landcare could fix degradation within ten years when so much of agricultural practice in Australia is unsustainable in its current form.  It was equally unrealistic to have expected that $340 million, thought to be a vast amount at the time, could do anything more than prime the process.

If however, the goal of Landcare was to move community norms and attitudes in the direction of sustainability it should be judged as a success.  There can be no doubt that it brought into stark focus the problems the nation is confronting in the use of  natural resources.  This was particularly true of urban dwellers, who not only gained a better understanding of what was happening in the bush, but also produced their own impressive Landcare projects in the cities.

The best performances in Landcare activities have been inspirational beyond the positive impacts on the individual projects involved.  It’s possible to glimpse the land management practices of the future by looking at any of the winners of the National and State Landcare awards.

Landcare also must be rated as a huge success if judged by the fact that by the end of the decade it involved one third of Australia’s farmers.  This equated to over 4,500 Landcare groups, far exceeding the ambitious target of 1,000 groups which had been set.  This has led to shared information, access to collective resources and the spread of new ideas and advice and above all, a change in the ethic of land ownership towards stewardship.  The groups provided mutual support, encouragement and reinforcement.  They changed community norms on what it is to be a good farmer, often between generations.

Importantly, Landcare forced the Commonwealth and States to integrate their environmental, natural resources and agriculture policies and service delivery.

But thinking back on it all, Rick and I always felt that there was something missing.  There was a need for an economic driver to power the whole process far beyond the reach of government grants.

I believe the Carbon Farming Initiative; part of the Gillard Government’s Clean Energy Package has the capacity to become that driver.

 Put simply, the CFI aims to provide financial incentives for farmers, forest growers, landholders and landfill operators to develop projects that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create carbon credits which can then be sold into carbon markets.  If a landholder can, for example, establish complying vegetation on a portion of his property, it will over the required 100 year life of the project produce carbon credits, which can be sold to buyers in need of plentiful, cheap carbon credits.  The buyers are likely to be big resource companies, power generators or any other enterprise with a sufficiently big carbon footprint to be liable for carbon tax under either the Australia’s carbon tax reduction mechanism or one overseas.

I have been looking initially at the prospects of Brigalow, a native acacia that has a huge capacity for carbon uptake and will potentially provide a low cost, resilient form of greenhouse gas offset.  The project aims to provide farmers with opportunities to re-establish Brigalow woodland according to a methodology developed by the Queensland Environment Department and currently with the Commonwealth Government for approval.

The Brigalow Belt spans inland in eastern Queensland from Townsville to northern New South Wales and covers an area of about 40 million hectares.  Despite such a large area, only about 2% of the Brigalow Belt is protected in conservation reserves.  There’s a strong concern that vegetation communities that were once widespread on prime agricultural lands like Brigalow are especially under-represented in reserves.

The major threat to Brigalow since European settlement has been clearing or severe modification of the vegetation because much of the landscape is so eminently suitable for agriculture  and is relatively unproductive in its natural state.  Most of the clearing has occurred since 1960 and although the rate has slowed, the cost of habitat destruction will take decades or even centuries to unfold.

Of the animal species that formerly occupied the Brigalow Belt several are now totally extinct including the Paradise Parrot, the White-Footed Rabbit-rat, the Brush- tailed Bettong and the Darling Downs Hopping-mouse.  Many other animal species have severely declined or are regionally extinct, for example the Bilby, the Eastern Quoll and the Northern Hairy Nosed Wombat.  The same situation applies to native flora. Fragmentation, over-grazing, soil erosion, raised water tables and salinity further reduce the quality of the remaining habitats.

But the really exciting characteristic of Brigalow is that it has a tenacious capacity to regenerate through suckers growing from its extensive underground root system.  This has of course been a source of ongoing frustration to land holders wishing to create pastures or crops, because every 5 years or so they have been forced to re-pull the suckers at considerable expense.

Imagine however if this regenerative capacity was used to reinstate strips of Brigalow, perhaps strategically placed along fence lines and maybe designed to connect to similar corridors of re-vegetation on adjoining properties or conservation reserves.  Environment agencies in Queensland have been dreaming and planning for this approach for decades but without money to underwrite such an exercise.  That’s all changed with the introduction of the Carbon Farming Initiative.

Let me illustrate how it might work.  On average 50 year old Brigalow regrowth sequesters 120 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare according to the draft methodology.  At a carbon price of $23 per tonne of carbon dioxide this equates to an income of $2,760 per hectare over the first 50 years of the project’s life.  This gives the landholder a gross return of $55 per hectare per year on average.

If we assume a carbon project of a thousand hectares, not unrealistic given the size of many of the big cattle properties in the Brigalow Belt, the return is $55,000 per year over the first 50 years.  This slowly declines thereafter as Brigalow matures.

In discussions with pastoralists they calculate that in prime brigalow country and with reasonable cattle prices they can run one beast for every 5 hectares to generate gross returns as high as $70 per hectare per annum, so the carbon sequestration option looks to fall short.  However it is important to note that there’s the potential for grazing in the first few decades of a Brigalow project to provide some grazing returns as well as carbon credits.  Grazing also reduces the risk of fire in the young Brigalow regrowth.

Queensland Department of Primary Industry Research has shown that it is possible to run one animal per five hectares in 20 year old Brigalow and one animal per 20 hectares in 50 year old Brigalow.  It’s the capacity to both graze and grow a carbon farming project that brings the returns very close to the grazing alone option but I suspect that the balance swings in favour of the carbon grazing option when we factor in the capital costs of Brigalow re-clearing each five years or so if the property was used for a graze-alone operation.

One objection to the grazing in regrowing Brigalow is that cattle are impossible to muster in thickening bush but I believe that some of the best cattlemen are making this simple by manipulating access to water in these regrowth areas to force the cattle out to cleared areas when required.

Finally there’s the real possibility for accessing grants from the Commonwealth’s $1 billion Biodiversity Fund which is an integral part of the Clean Energy Future package.  An example might be funding to enable a group of landholders to plan for and create a corridor of re-vegetation to link conservation reserves.

You will notice that I’m not talking about locking up land that would otherwise be used for food production.  We are talking about small percentages of many properties being used for carbon farming projects, rather than large percentages of a few properties.

One disincentive for re-vegetation projects under the present draft methodology, especially to the owners of small holdings, is the high cost of measuring the amount of carbon stored in vegetation.  Currently this requires physically measuring the biomass which could work out to be as much as $8 per hectare per annum over the life of the project.

To overcome this impediment I am now part of a grant bid to convert directly measured data into a computer model which will predict growth rates in different vegetation and rainfall zones.  Once achieved this will reduce verification costs substantially and to a level where all landholders can undertake projects.

I am now working with a major law firm in Brisbane to link its big resource and energy clients with its agribusiness clients.  We are seeking to harness the potential of carbon farming in what appears to me to be a win, win, win scenario – cheap large volumes of offset credits for those with a carbon liability, a new and potentially valuable revenue stream for landholders, often with volatile returns from agriculture alone and a big plus for the protection of other values such as soil health and biodiversity.

In future there will be other CFI activities such as credits derived from increasing the amount of carbon in agricultural soils, particularly in the south east of Australia which will restore the fertility of many areas currently suffering from depleted soils.  Work is also underway on methodologies for bio-gas capture from feedlots or abattoir waste.

Importantly, the sequestering of carbon in plants and soil is one of the few ways of dealing with ‘legacy carbon’ that is the vast amounts already in the atmosphere and already causing climate change which can buy us time in our moves away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy.

Could this indeed be a turbocharger for the next phase of Landcare?  I think it just might and now is the time for farmers, conservationists and government to once more come together to make it happen.

I know that Farley would have loved the possibilities this presents and after all, he began his farm politics career in the Brigalow country.

Robyn Williams: He certainly did, and later married Linda Burney, a Minister in the New South Wales government. That was Phillip Toyne, one of the founders of Landcare, showing that a bottom-up approach to managing change can work better than top down. Although assistance from above, or even Canberra, is always welcome.
Next week Len Fisher asks whether scientists have a sense of humour: There’s a challenge.