L.SFP.1005 - Environmental Credentials for grassfed beef - ground cover theme

Summary

This project contributes the ground cover theme for the Environmental Credentials for Australian Beef project, which is developing a single online platform for grassfed beef producers to demonstrate sustainability to their markets using remote sensing and additional information. The methodology comprised a desk review for background scoping research, a series of co-design working groups, and synthesis of their deliberations and team investigations into a design brief.

Ground cover as a demonstrable environmental credential for Australian beef is specifically about demonstrating that high levels of ground cover are being retained in grassfed grazing systems. This has the potential to provide multiple benefits to producers, including:
• better management of ground cover to improve productivity/profitability and management of a key operational risk
• quantify their performance against their farm targets or regional benchmarks
• support the industry to showcase best practice environmental stewardship.

Ground cover is defined as the vegetation (living and dead) and biological material that is in contact with
the soil surface. Ground cover includes both green (i.e. photosynthetic vegetation) and non-green (i.e. non-photosynthetic dry vegetation and plant litter) components. The amount of ground cover is the result of interactions between landscape characteristics (soil, topography and vegetation), climate, and land management. Some areas support naturally higher levels of ground cover due to factors such as high soil fertility and consistently high annual rainfall. The amount and type of ground cover affects many soil processes including infiltration, runoff and surface erosion. Maintenance of ground cover is essential for sustainable production, especially in rangeland environments where rainfall is highly variable.

Objectives

The objectives for the ‘Ground Cover’ theme were to:
1. Develop the design brief for the Ground Cover Theme for Environmental Credentials for Australian Beef (Smart Farms) project ready for translation into an on-line platform. Theme designs will include indicators, measuring tools/approaches, benchmarks and learning resources. The platform design must be suitable for producer self-assessment of environmental performance.
2. Support the environmental credentials platform developer in integrating the ground cover theme into the on-line platform.

Key findings

The ground cover theme co-design group successfully agreed on a design brief which will inform the second stage of the Project: the development of the proposed online sustainability platform and learning resources. This included the Cibo Labs platform and inclusion in the learning resources around biodiversity.

Benefits to industry

This project has the potential to enable the following significant outcomes:
• Australian grassfed beef producers are rewarded for demonstrating their environmental credentials to customers, consumers and the community.
• Australian grassfed beef producers are able to undertake self-directed learning to improve performance across five key environmental themes.
• Australian grassfed beef producers are able to respond to other market drivers (for example but not limited to customer requirements, accessing farm loans or schemes etc.) requiring demonstrable environmental credentials.

MLA action

MLA will continue to maintain and improve the Environmental Credentials platform for the immediate future. This will help build a user base and demonstrate the value of the platform for producers and end users of sustainability data. MLA plans to continue to make improvements to the platform to enhance the user experience, value, and utility of the platform.

Future research

Further research will be useful on:
• evaluation of the platform some time after release
• research on market demand
• research on verification and certification
• expansion to other agricultural industries
• accuracy of satellite imagery for parts of Australia will be needed to improve the third party verified technology.