Change is coming to the agricultural sector, whether producers are ready or not.

This is a hard-won reality that agricultural consultant Cam Nicholson relays to his clients.

With over 35 years of experience in pasture and soils agronomy, Cam is seeing first-hand the push for sustainability reporting across supply chains. He encourages growers to focus on the things they can control—their comfort around change, preparedness, and education.

“Things like emissions accounting will be inevitable, and we might not know exactly what that looks like today, but we should prepare for it,” Cam said.

“The number one thing producers need to get comfortable with is what their emissions intensity number may look like, what it means, and how they can calculate it in an accurate and simple way.”

Emissions intensity is presented as a unit of greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂e) per unit of production. Like other efficiency figures, such as water use efficiency or nitrogen use efficiency, it can be used to track and show the impact of on-farm management improvements.

Across grain production, supply chains are already starting to request environmental reporting from producers to assess the overall impact of production; a trend that is reflected in green agricultural loans with lenders.

Until recently, this level of reporting relied on calculations via Greenhouse Accounting Framework (GAF) spreadsheets. But today, producers have free access to a more user-friendly, cross-commodity alternative, AIA’s Environmental Accounting Platform (EAP).

“Using the spreadsheet templates you’d come across the same issues as anyone who’s ever used spreadsheets — mistaken data loss, deleting formulas and inevitability of human error,” he said.

“The spreadsheet style was overwhelming when you first started and felt more laborious than it was. Another barrier I found was the fixed number of commodities that could be included.”

For Cam’s mixed-commodity and grains clients, this limitation meant having to use separate cropping and livestock GAF tools. This commonly led to on-farm practices weren’t accurately recorded, which impacted the overall emission intensity that they were generating.

“The crops you’re growing may be wheat, but they might be grazing or hard wheat. The difference between the two is the regime of fertilisers and possibly herbicides, but because of limitations with the GAF tool choices the two were hard to separate,” Cam said.

“The arrival of AIA’s Environmental Accounting Platform (EAP) is a real advantage because it separates out commodities and treatments that were otherwise being combined and inaccurately recorded.

“It also enables streams of record keeping information, such as petrol, electricity, and water use, which are already on-hand to a producer during their tax returns, to be collated in the emission recording.”

Today the Agricultural Innovation Australia (AIA) EAP tool is free to use, and captures more than 15 commodities, with specificity for grain that captures more than 18 types.

The tool enables producers to confidentially input and calculate emissions data relating to their business. This is both a useful starting point for growers becoming more familiar with agricultural greenhouse gas accounting, and an advanced solution for those who are further progressed.

“Producers retain control of their data and control the permissions in-platform to share some or all of it with third parties. It’s total control and autonomy to the farmer,” Cam said.

“As the landscape changes and emissions intensity reporting becomes more of a focus, Australia has the potential to be a world leader.

“We’re already a low emissions intensity producer on a national scale compared to other countries. Now, we need the number at the farm level to back it up.

“When my clients do their numbers, most realise that they’re stacking up well.

“If the industry doesn’t get comfortable and proactively do the work to get that figure for their individual operations, we could be disadvantaging market access and Australian grain on the whole.”

For more information, visit aiaeap.com or contact info@aiaplatform.com.au.

This case study is an investment of the Grains Research and Development Corporation.

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The EAP was built with investment from ten of Australia’s rural Research and Development Corporations: Grains Research and Development Corporation, Meat & Livestock Australia, Australian Eggs, Australian Pork Limited, AgriFutures Australia, Cotton Research and Development Corporation, Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, Sugar Research Australia, Wine Australia and the Australian Meat Processor Corporation.

The EAP is also supported by a panel of Australia’s leading experts in greenhouse gas accounting, emissions reduction, soil carbon management, lifecycle assessment and climate science. Read about our Technical Advisory Panel.

Agricultural Innovation Australia We are a not-for-profit company established by the 15 rural Research and Development Corporations to facilitate joint investment and collaboration in cross-industry agricultural issues of national importance.