Farm smarter, not harder: new science-driven tool for net zero farming

By  Grace Kirkby 6 February 2025 3 min read

Agriculture plays a vital role in feeding, clothing, and fuelling a growing global population.

Central to Australia’s economy, agriculture builds local communities and supports environmental benefits like biodiversity and water stewardship. However, agriculture contributes 13 per cent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonising agriculture is key to unlocking opportunities for communities, industry and the environment.

Farmers need support and clear pathways to help reduce emissions and build a more sustainable future. This is where science comes in.

We are helping decarbonise agriculture by developing new technologies and practices to reduce emissions and create sequestration opportunities on farms. All this while supporting market confidence through measurement and monitoring to make sure we’re going in the right direction.

CEFC Towards Net Zero Agriculture Pathfinder Manual 

Together with Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) our Towards Net Zero Mission has developed the Towards Net Zero Agriculture Pathfinder Manual (Pathfinder).

Pathfinder equips farmers and managers with practical, evidence-based strategies to adopt plans and practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions on farms. In turn, many of these activities qualify for CEFC-supported loan products – providing discounted finance to farmers as an incentive for reducing emissions.

Michael Battaglia is our Towards Net Zero Mission lead. He is focused on creating pathways to support farmers to deliver lower emissions products and meet their climate goals.

“The manual starts with simple approaches to reduce emissions which are easy to adopt and monitor,” Michael said. 

Reducing emissions in agriculture is a team game 

"By connecting science, finance, and policy, we can create the practices and means for our farmers to reduce emissions. It needs to be a team game,” Michael said. 

Working towards low emissions agriculture means addressing central challenges which include:

• The price difference between conventional and low emissions practices, which can slow change – even though other benefits might occur in the long term.

• High uncertainty about production gains or impacts, higher costs of inputs particularly when novel and not produced at scale.

• The need to invest up-front through things like realigned fencing.

De-risking investment through partnerships and innovation 

Partnerships with industry help identify pathways for investment, and foster collaboration between diverse stakeholders. 

We are all familiar with novel science inventions creating new possibilities for industry, like Wi-Fi. There is another important part to industry and science partnerships – exploring and co-creating the way inventions are put to use.

Michael said this is just one example of how we can accelerate the net zero transition.

“A big part of this is understanding the risks in these technologies, their maturity and readiness for market and how other bits of the system can support their uptake,” Michael said. 

To do this, we need lots of different perspectives to come together. 

We need inventors to discover and design things. Farmers and practitioners to understand and tweak these to fit into their farming systems. Banks then need to build market mechanisms that direct money to support adoption. Finally, regulators need to make sure there are no unintended consequences of widespread adoption. 

Moving toward net zero

The future for agriculture is complex. Investment in science and tech alone won’t be enough to move the sector towards net zero. 

“We need to see widescale uptake of low emission tech across agriculture, food and energy sectors,” said Michael.

Creating simple, low-risk but high-integrity pathways is vital to empower farmers to make informed sustainability decisions tailored to them.