A high productivity agricultural pilot could combine soil carbon, plantation forestry, environmental plantings or other applicable methods in a single carbon farming project.

Imagine if you could only sell one commodity that you produced on your farm. For example, you have grazed beef cattle but can only sell the prime cut, or raised sheep but can only sell the wool. The carbon market has operated a bit like this in the last few years – with farmers only getting paid for a subset of their sustainable land management activities.

The active landscape management approach aims to rectify this problem and to better align the carbon farming framework with how land is managed on the ground. This will make it easier for farmers to get involved in carbon farming because a greater portion of the emissions reduction actions taken by land managers to be recognised. This will provide increased revenue from carbon projects, and enable smaller farms and additional agricultural regions to access carbon farming.

A key goal of the active landscape management approach is to make carbon farming accessible outside the rangelands, overcoming current barriers to participation for high  productivity agricultural areas, such as high transaction costs for relatively small land parcels.

Climate Friendly is initially establishing pilot projects in Victoria, and plans to expand this to other high productivity agricultural areas.