On farm with Wilmot Cattle Company | Farmonline | 03/03/24 - video Dailymotion

Farm Online

Hear from Stuart Austin, Wilmot General Manager, Alasdair MacLeod, Macdoch Australia, Hungarian beef producer Bela Jankovich and Atlas Caron CEO Asley Silver who spoke with Shan Goodwin.

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00:00 Up to 350 people attended a field day at Wilmot Cattle Company, where a dramatic shift in momentum

00:06 to focus on farming that builds natural capital, enhances soil carbon sequestration and lifts farm

00:12 productivity was put under the microscope. Wilmot is an 8,000 hectare beef cattle breeding, trading

00:18 and grass finishing operation, comprising of four properties in the New England region of New South

00:23 Wales. General Manager Stuart Austin said 2024 had the potential to be a game changer for

00:29 accelerating change in Australian agriculture. Stuart this is number six for Wilmot, why do you

00:35 put on these field days? It's a great question Chan, one of the things I'm really passionate

00:39 about is helping other people and particularly helping industry and it's quite amazing the

00:43 community that comes together here from all over Australia, in fact we've got some international

00:47 guests as well this year, they come together to learn how we can think differently about how we

00:52 do agriculture. And how would you say things have changed in those six years, what do you reckon

00:58 the biggest change you've seen is? Probably one of the main evolutions has been talking,

01:02 you know originally started talking about grazing management and then soil carbon and

01:06 now we're talking about natural capital and I think in the not too distant future we'll be

01:10 talking about biodiversity. Alastair MacLeod from Wilmot Owners MacDock Australia kicked the event

01:16 off with the message that agriculture had the potential to go way beyond net zero to help other

01:21 sectors of the economy decarbonise. So we have an objective now in the ag community and indeed

01:30 across the Australian economy to achieve net zero carbon emissions i.e you know for every

01:37 tonne of co2 that we're emitting we will either reduce them or we'll offset them. So

01:49 as I was saying in my opening comments I don't believe that we're ever going to get to the point

01:56 certainly in the foreseeable future across the economy where we will be able to reduce

02:01 emissions significantly so we're going to need to offset some of those emissions. And the reason

02:07 why we're not going to be able to reduce emissions significantly is because there are lots of hard

02:12 to abate sectors. It may well be that agriculture is one of them but there are lots of hard to abate

02:19 sectors and we're going to need to find another way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

02:25 and there's no better way of doing that than the way nature does it. Producers from every state

02:31 attended the field day along with some overseas visitors. What do you see is the biggest difference

02:35 between the cattle in Australia here and what you have back home? Well cattle is cattle also back

02:41 home but the way you go about it here because it's so mainstream that's very impressive. So it's more

02:48 the people around it how you go about it the massive scale of it and of course what we see

02:52 today is how you treat the soil and how you can improve the soil with cattle that's very impressive.

02:57 One of the companies at the event was Atlas Carbon which specializes in ensuring producers

03:02 have a clear understanding of their potential for earning carbon credits in relation to production.

03:07 Atlas is now one year old. So one year on for Atlas Carbon we're really excited to see a lot

03:13 more interest coming into the sector both from graziers as well as industry and investors.

03:19 I think a big learning that that we're seeing is the excitement that producers have but just an

03:26 information gap on what it takes to to be successful in a soil carbon project and also all of

03:32 the kind of regulatory requirements around that. So we know that government's investing more in this

03:37 we're investing more in this just so we can get more information out for livestock producers so

03:41 so they can make the decisions that they need.

On farm with Wilmot Cattle Company | Farmonline | 03/03/24

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