On farm with Wilmot Cattle Company | Farmonline | 03/03/24
Hear from Stuart Austin, Wilmot General Manager, Alasdair MacLeod, Macdoch Australia, Hungarian beef producer Bela Jankovich and Atlas Caron CEO Asley Silver who spoke with Shan Goodwin.
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00:00 Up to 350 people attended a field day at Wilmot Cattle Company, where a dramatic shift in momentum
00:06 to focus on farming that builds natural capital, enhances soil carbon sequestration and lifts farm
00:12 productivity was put under the microscope. Wilmot is an 8,000 hectare beef cattle breeding, trading
00:18 and grass finishing operation, comprising of four properties in the New England region of New South
00:23 Wales. General Manager Stuart Austin said 2024 had the potential to be a game changer for
00:29 accelerating change in Australian agriculture. Stuart this is number six for Wilmot, why do you
00:35 put on these field days? It's a great question Chan, one of the things I'm really passionate
00:39 about is helping other people and particularly helping industry and it's quite amazing the
00:43 community that comes together here from all over Australia, in fact we've got some international
00:47 guests as well this year, they come together to learn how we can think differently about how we
00:52 do agriculture. And how would you say things have changed in those six years, what do you reckon
00:58 the biggest change you've seen is? Probably one of the main evolutions has been talking,
01:02 you know originally started talking about grazing management and then soil carbon and
01:06 now we're talking about natural capital and I think in the not too distant future we'll be
01:10 talking about biodiversity. Alastair MacLeod from Wilmot Owners MacDock Australia kicked the event
01:16 off with the message that agriculture had the potential to go way beyond net zero to help other
01:21 sectors of the economy decarbonise. So we have an objective now in the ag community and indeed
01:30 across the Australian economy to achieve net zero carbon emissions i.e you know for every
01:37 tonne of co2 that we're emitting we will either reduce them or we'll offset them. So
01:49 as I was saying in my opening comments I don't believe that we're ever going to get to the point
01:56 certainly in the foreseeable future across the economy where we will be able to reduce
02:01 emissions significantly so we're going to need to offset some of those emissions. And the reason
02:07 why we're not going to be able to reduce emissions significantly is because there are lots of hard
02:12 to abate sectors. It may well be that agriculture is one of them but there are lots of hard to abate
02:19 sectors and we're going to need to find another way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
02:25 and there's no better way of doing that than the way nature does it. Producers from every state
02:31 attended the field day along with some overseas visitors. What do you see is the biggest difference
02:35 between the cattle in Australia here and what you have back home? Well cattle is cattle also back
02:41 home but the way you go about it here because it's so mainstream that's very impressive. So it's more
02:48 the people around it how you go about it the massive scale of it and of course what we see
02:52 today is how you treat the soil and how you can improve the soil with cattle that's very impressive.
02:57 One of the companies at the event was Atlas Carbon which specializes in ensuring producers
03:02 have a clear understanding of their potential for earning carbon credits in relation to production.
03:07 Atlas is now one year old. So one year on for Atlas Carbon we're really excited to see a lot
03:13 more interest coming into the sector both from graziers as well as industry and investors.
03:19 I think a big learning that that we're seeing is the excitement that producers have but just an
03:26 information gap on what it takes to to be successful in a soil carbon project and also all of
03:32 the kind of regulatory requirements around that. So we know that government's investing more in this
03:37 we're investing more in this just so we can get more information out for livestock producers so
03:41 so they can make the decisions that they need.