The Emissions Burden on Farmers Adds Up

Most of the emissions conversation on an Australian farm is about the property itself, cutting methane, tightening up fertiliser use, keeping a record clean enough that a bank or a processor can see where the numbers actually come from. A new report, Shifting the Burden, out this month from Farmers for Climate Action says that's only the visible part of what farmers are actually carrying, and puts real figures on the rest of it for the first time.

The most immediate cost Shifting the Burden identifies shows up in the bank account. ABARES data cited in the report puts the hit at 23 per cent of average annual broadacre farm profit- close to $29,200 a farm, driven by worsening fires, floods and droughts and the insurance premiums that follow them, and one that's landed hardest in the cropping country of south-western and south-eastern Australia (p.12).

There's a second cost that's been building for even longer, and it's one nobody sends an invoice for. Farmland has been quietly storing carbon and helping bring down Australia's own emissions total for years, without a contract behind it, a payment attached to it, or much recognition either way. Regional Policy Solutions estimates that work at around 31.2 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent a year (p.13), and on top of it, agriculture is now being asked to generate even more credits again, ones industrial polluters can buy instead of reducing their own ghg emissions.

That choice sits at the heart of the Safeguard Mechanism, the federal policy meant to be driving down emissions at Australia's biggest industrial sites. Big emitters covered by the scheme can either cut their own pollution or buy credits to offset it, and a large share of those credits are grown on farmland. In 2024-25, coal, oil and gas facilities bought close to nine million of them, two-thirds of the entire scheme, while their own physical emissions barely moved (p.5). As the report says on page 8: "The burden does not disappear. It shifts."

Rushy Lagoon is where that shift is playing out most visibly right now. It's a 21,744-hectare property in northern Tasmania, currently the subject of a State Parliamentary inquiry, where a proposal would convert 9,000 hectares of productive farmland into a pine plantation for an estimated 3.2 million carbon credits (pp.10-11). Food-producing land, taken out of production for good, because that's the cheaper option for an industrial emitter, rather than actually cutting its own pollution at the source.

It's the kind of trade-off that's drawn criticism beyond the report itself. Former NSW Farmers committee chair Mitchell Clapham described it to The Land as heavy industry getting "an easy out," even while agriculture has already committed to net zero by 2050 on its own account. None of this is a new complaint, either. Former NSW Farmers president Mal Peters made much the same point to the New England Times, saying farmers have been "carrying the environmental load for the whole country" for over two decades, without the recognition to go with it.

That's part of why a farm's own numbers matter here too, not just the industry-wide estimate this report is built on. The reduction work behind a report like this one still happens on individual properties, one paddock and one input decision at a time, and it's easy for that to disappear inside a national average. A farm already reporting through Ruminati has its own record of exactly that work, rather than a share of a 31.2 megatonne estimate with its name nowhere on it.

Public submissions to the current Safeguard Mechanism review close on 18 September, and the report's recommendations are aimed squarely at that process. The full report is worth reading in its own right, at farmersforclimateaction.org.au/our-vision-and-plan/reports.