When researching collaborative carbon farming, a surprise finding made one researcher pivot to find other ways farmers can team up.
Dr Alex Baumber
You’d be forgiven for thinking Dr Alex Baumber was a frustrated farmer. “Maybe a little bit,” he laughed.
But the senior lecturer in TD School never set out to research farmers and land management systems – it was an organic career path. After studying environmental science and working for the federal Environment Department in Canberra, he came to realise that the complex systems principles he studied can be applied anywhere.
He first became exposed to farmers and land managers while working in the department’s Wildlife Management section.
“I had a lot of people from regional areas involved in kangaroo harvesting, but also native plants and animals, wildlife parks and zoos …that were involved in captive breeding programs.”
Dr Baumber soon realised he was making decisions about environments he had never been exposed to, let alone understood.
“I became frustrated that I was kind of sitting in Canberra in an office, passing judgment on people's management processes, and they would have to apply to us for a permit to trade commercially, or to import and export …I didn’t feel comfortable passing judgment.”
This led to him flipping things around by working on a research program that took him out to farms and properties where he could talk to people about commercial opportunities around native species.
“Then I moved into a research space, looking at where the risks and the opportunities are, and how policy measures can be tailored to encourage the things that we want to encourage while protecting against negative impacts.”
He has recently finished a project funded by AgriFutures about collaborative carbon farming. Put simply, carbon farming is about increasing or maintaining the level of carbon in soils and vegetation.
“You might take cattle or sheep off an area and fence it off to allow the trees to regrow and regenerate. You don't actively have to go and plant the trees. But you allow that regeneration and new system to happen. And then there's carbon that's stored in those trees over time.”
He says that in carbon farming, farmers can also alternate paddocks to give the soil and native plants a chance to regenerate, without losing the use of the paddock for an extended period of time. It’s called cell grazing or time-controlled grazing. He says when it comes down to it, it’s about assisting regeneration and, ultimately, productivity.
But what about the collaborative aspect of the research project? AgriFutures wanted to look at practices that store carbon, but believed the area it would likely happen in were places with high rainfall – but where property sizes were smaller. They started looking at scale.
“They were interested in collaborative approaches involving multiple landholders. So that's what we explored in our project.”
By farmers working together, their carbon farming may be more efficient, as well as providing a less isolating experience. By storing carbon collaboratively, they can sell more of it to people and companies who want to buy carbon credits – and maybe attract a premium price. A win-win, right?
I think the most surprising finding was probably that tightly integrated collaborative models were very unpopular with the landholders we spoke to … There's such a loss of independence, and there's a very independent mindset amongst a lot of Australian farmers. They want to maintain autonomy over their own properties and their own management practices.
– Dr Alex Baumber
Close collaboration may be appealing to some farmers who are used to it – like those who are already part of a farming co-op for beef or dairy production. But for others, commercial collaboration can come with risks.
“[If] one of the neighbours doesn't do everything that was agreed as part of the group or the amount of carbon that gets stored in the soil is less than they thought it was going to be, you're exposed to that risk from someone else's property. And it makes people uncomfortable, especially when they don't have a history of collaborating commercially.”
The research was invaluable for raising this issue and highlighting that different types of collaboration may be possible.
“We did find there's strong interest in more informal types of collaboration, particularly around sharing information. And so, if you can work together as a group, it's much easier to get information and bounce ideas off one another.”
Dr Baumber said this type of collaboration also increases trust, especially concerning carbon brokers.
“They'll often sign you up and sell the carbon into the market. They don't necessarily have high levels of trust in those communities. We’ve had a lot of people use the term ‘sharks’ to describe some of those service providers. How do you know if you can trust them or not?”
But why is carbon farming important in the first place?
“One is that it's a key part of Australia's Net Zero transition by 2050, which is been set as a federal goal, and also state governments are certainly on board and promoting it. It's not just about reducing emissions from existing industries, manufacturing, and transport, and so on. It's also about taking carbon out of the atmosphere, and that's what carbon farming can do.”
The other reason, he said, is the land itself.
Probably my strongest motivation is the co-benefits of carbon farming, which is more about things like protecting soils against erosion, providing habitat for biodiversity, perhaps reducing sedimentation into streams as well, and also the cultural and social benefits.
For a scientist, it is striking how Dr Baumber is interested in communities and people – whether there is impact upon them or working together to share information. He concedes the flip side of some types of carbon farming has a potential to be detrimental to local communities.
“One of the criticisms that's occurred around carbon farming in certain areas is people have to remove stock from land for a period of time. In some areas that's led to absenteeism of the landholder. It’s when people still own the property, but they’ve basically decided they're not going to actively farm it anymore, and they move out of the area. That leads to rural depopulation. There's less people putting their kids into schools. And shopping at the local shops.”
Dr Baumber also says this absenteeism can mean a lack of action on the land – so things like feral animals, bushfires, and weeds can spread due to the lack of management.
He says there’s also concerns of inequality. It can create “haves and have-nots”, especially when there are some very strict rules about eligibility. Your neighbour may qualify, but you may not.
”I think you've got to listen to those concerns. And you've got to adapt your policy measures and take a collaborative initiative, and some of that transdisciplinary thinking around things like values and worldviews. Making sure that they're part of the mix is important. I think one of the problems with the way that carbon farming policy or emissions reduction policy in general was developed was that it relied quite heavily on the science. They didn't necessarily consult with local people to say, well, does this also align with your values for what represents good land management?”
For his next project, Dr Baumber is working on the New South Wales government‘s On-Farm Carbon Advice project – a state government program that focuses on advice for farmers about carbon farming and allows them to learn from one another. In the future, he would like to research how Indigenous communities manage fires in ways that reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere and store more in vegetation. Not surprisingly, he would like to explore the cultural and social aspects surrounding it. Next year, he will be going to South Africa on his sabbatical to try to build connections and connect with practices there.
“I would definitely also like to do further research on some of the community-scale impacts on areas where carbon farming is increasing. And I think that area of social licence is something I'd definitely like to do more of. That's the future area that I want to get more involved in - trying to understand some of the community-scale effects in areas where carbon farming has really taken off.”
He believes working at the TD school has helped him look at his research from all angles.
Much of my transdisciplinary work in teaching here in the school focuses on complexity and complex systems. A lot of that is transferable to a rural context - for example, resilience is something I’ve explored around carbon farming.