More and more of the requests for emissions figures that reach Australian producers are coming from their bank, their processor or a buyer further along the supply chain, and for a lot of them the sticking point is time and knowing where to start. If you work alongside producers as an agronomist, accountant, bookkeeper or consultant, that puts you close to the problem whether or not anyone’s asked you about it yet.
That’s the thinking behind the Ruminati Advisor Network. Agronomists, accountants, bookkeepers, farm consultants, Landcare groups, NRM groups, farmer collectives and producer organisations can register as service providers, which means you can set up and manage emissions reports for the clients you already work with, with their permission. Boyce Accountants, Bentleys, Agrista, Carbon Stock, Elders, Landcare Agriculture, Rabobank and CommBank are among those registered so far, so it’s a mix of banks, accountants, consultancies and extension groups, which fits the range of places producers go for support anyway.
Once your organisation is registered, you get a dashboard showing each client connected to your account and whether their report has been started, is complete or needs action, so you can see where everyone’s up to without ringing around. If you’ve got a team, you can assign people to particular clients and set what each of them can see and do. A bookkeeper might complete and edit reports without managing the client relationship, while a senior adviser has full access across the client list, and that can follow how your office already divides the work.
Bringing a client on starts with an invitation. You enter their details, they get an invite to join Ruminati PRIME, and they choose how much access to give you. That’s the part worth being able to explain clearly to a client, because it’s their data: they decide who sees it, they can turn access off, and Ruminati is registered under the NFF Farm Data Code. If you already hold the information the report needs, you can start building it before they’ve logged in, which suits clients who are short on time or not very comfortable with digital tools, and they keep full sight of who can see what throughout.
A first emissions report done early means a client can answer a bank or buyer on their own terms, but it works best as the first of several. Someone with four years of records can show the seasonal variation and the trend underneath it, so a dry year reads differently once there’s a run of years behind it, and you’d be building that record with the client from the first year. For you, that makes the report the start of a longer conversation about the farm, in place of a one-off job.
If you run workshops or extension programs, the dashboard also tracks progress across a whole group of producers at once, which is handy when a funder or supply chain partner wants to know how many are taking part.
If that sounds like the work your organisation already does with producers, the team would be glad to talk about joining the network, and you can reach them at hello@ruminati.com.au. There’s also more on how Ruminati PRIME works for producers.
