Facilitation of the Australian Red Meat Industry Carbon Neutral 2030 Innovation Challenge

Summary

The project required Cicada Innovations to facilitate an innovation challenge/hackathon designed to investigate two key problem areas identified within MLA's Carbon Neutral 2030 Initiative being:

• Challenge 1: reducing or eliminate methane emissions without compromising the digestive efficiency of the animal;
• Challenge 2: measuring carbon in soils at depths of at least 1.2m in an accurate, scalable, and cost- effective manner.

The winning novel early-stage technology for each Challenge category provides a solution that can quickly scale for the red meat industry, and into the hands of graziers to enable and support their carbon management practices providing a pathway towards carbon neutrality by 2030.

Each winning solution clearly addressed the Challenge statement offering novel solutions, have the ability to scale in the short term into the hands of MLA members and contribute to the CN2030 goal, and are now in the MLA pipeline for further support and development.

Through a structured and supported 'Hackathon' process delivered by Cicada Innovations and MLA, has proven to provide a validated pathway for identifying and sourcing promising novel early-stage technologies from non-traditional areas which in turn, that can be supported further through MLA's R&D capabilities and commercialised for the benefit of the red meat industry.