Mitigation and adaptation in the Australian dairy industry
Background
In February, Dairy Australia submitted an expression of interest seeking Commonwealth funding to help build a broad base of industry confidence and competency to accommodate future climate challenges and opportunities. This has now been approved, but with DA’s proposal (focussed around on-farm demonstrations in each dairy region) combined with additional funding for projects from DPIV and Uni of Melb that focus more on testing the next generation of adaptation and mitigation options. The combined project is called Future Ready Dairy Systems (FRDS).
FRDS aims to position the dairy industry for whatever mix of adaptation/mitigation and/or resilience building strategies that are required in an uncertain climate and regulatory future. Significant change at the individual farm level requires four essential elements:
- That there are clear signals for farmers to respond to around adaptation and mitigation
- That viable and proven options exist for dairy farmers to adopt or adapt
- Dairy farmers have a trusted environment within which to make sense of their individual situations
- Dairy farmers are assisted to select their best options for investment or change
Overwhelmingly, FRDS is focussed on ensuring that there are viable, practical and profitable options for dairy farmers around climate change adaptation and mitigation so that the industry is fully prepared for whatever market or regulatory signals are sent to the dairy industry and/or to individual dairy farmers.
Outputs
The activities in the FRDS project will be focussed on delivering 5 key outputs:
1. A national network of 15 on-farm demonstration sites showing adaptation and mitigation strategies in action
These demonstration sites will be selected and ‘managed’ by a Regional Reference Group in each of the 8 dairy regions to ensure that the demonstration sites are focussed on issues that are locally relevant. Many demonstration sites are likely to involve activities across more than one farm, for example where several farms might be trialling different forage options, but no one farm would be trialling them all.
2. Information resources to assist understanding and implementation of adaptation and mitigation strategies
As part of a broadly based communication plan, these resources will be developed within the FRDS project and disseminated widely through the national, State and local partners, including milk processors and landcare networks. Many of the partners have strongly emerging web presences around climate challenges, and these will provide an ideal platform for on-going web delivery. The more traditional information sources (e.g. Milk Company supplier newsletters, fact sheets, rural press etc) will also be extensively used by FRDS.
3. Greenhouse gas emissions benchmarks and reporting processes for the dairy industry
The dairy industry has made a major commitment to understanding and reporting on greenhouse gas emissions across the whole supply chain. For example, the dairy industry is currently developing reportable greenhouse gas footprint information for the 5 main dairy products (fresh milk, whole and skim milk powder, butter and yoghurt). In addition, DGAS (the Dairy Greenhouse Abatement Strategies calculator ) will be used across all demonstration and validation farms in the FRDS project. This is both to build a more complete picture of greenhouse gas emissions across different farming systems, and to assess any impacts on emissions from changes in farming systems or practices that are the result of a changing or more variable climate.
4. Enhanced capacity of farmers to adapt and innovate in response to climate change and mitigation policies
Making proactive management decisions to adapt to and prosper in a dynamic and uncertain environment requires personal resilience to changing conditions, and new ways of learning and thinking about the complexities of the real world. Increasing farmer readiness is about strengthening the sense-making process of individuals and groups to increase their confidence to act despite the inevitable uncertainty surrounding climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation. Results from bio-physical science and modelling are rarely sufficient to inform the sense-making for farmers who generally require a greater array of inputs and congruence with their personal goals in order to make the decisions for which they bear the consequences.
5. Validation of emerging adaptation and mitigation strategies and interactions with farming systems
While the ‘already proven’ technologies and strategies for adaptation and mitigation will be demonstrated directly on commercial dairy farms across Australia, there is a ‘next generation’ of technologies and strategies that are not proven sufficiently to be recommended to dairy farmers. This includes strategies that may reduce greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farms, but for which there is not yet a market or regulatory signal to underpin adoption on farm. This output focuses on proving/validating these emerging technologies on research rather than commercial farms – ie at DemoDairy in Western Victoria and at Dookie in northern Victoria.
FRDS is a bold and exciting initiative for the dairy industry because it:
• Integrates the activities of all the key players involved in exploring the climate change issues in the dairy industry, nationally regionally and locally, and brings an integrated focus to the issues of adaption and mitigation within commercial farming systems.
• Recognises that enabling successful adaptation by dairy farmers to a variable and uncertain climate future requires more than just providing technological fixes. FRDS will seek to enhance personal resilience, and support a culture of learning, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
• Captures and shares across the industry, those lessons from dairy farms that have already been severely impacted by drought/climate change over the last decade, and where significant adaptations have already occurred.
• Maximises opportunities for farmer to farmer learning through the establishment of a national network of at least 15 on-farm demonstration sites across all 8 dairy regions, demonstrating leading edge mitigation and adaptation technologies that are already proven and farm ready.
• Empowers regional reference groups (of dairy farmers, leading farm consultants, senior milk company field officers, state dairy extension agency staff, landcare coordinators, local government representatives and research providers) to select the appropriate demonstrations to ensure a focus on local needs
• Validates the ‘next round’ of adaptation and mitigation strategies that are emerging from current research across a range of rainfed and irrigated dairy systems.
• Establishes dairy farm greenhouse gas emissions benchmarks and reporting processes to provide a baseline for future reductions and to input into NCAS (the National Carbon Accounting Scheme).
• Develops a composite dairy case study around the adoption challenges, in association with CSIRO’s Transforming Agriculture project.
• Builds on the major research initiatives from the first round of DAFF’s Climate Change Research Program, including the Reducing Emissions from Livestock Research Program (RELRP), the Nitrous Oxide Research Program (NORP), the Soil Carbon Research Program (SCRP) and the Adaptation Research Program of Australia’s Farming Future, driving the transition from research to on-farm practice.
FRDS will begin in June 2010 and run for two years. The DAFF contribution will be $1.95m with other, major contributions from DA, DPIV, UM, TIAR, RDP’s, Milk Companies and State based extension Agencies.
For more information, contact the Dairying for Tomorrow coordinator in your region, or Warren Mason, the national FRDS coordinator.