Event Details

Where: Zoom Webinars
When: 12 September 2022 | 12pm-1pm AEST
Price: FREE

Climate Change and Organic Cropping

Climate change represents numerous future difficulties for the agricultural sector with extreme weather events already costing Australian farms on average $30,000 annually and rising (ABARES). Organic agriculture presents a growing opportunity to mitigate climate change by reducing direct and indirect sources of greenhouse gas emissions through carbon sequestration. Increasing soil carbon is just one of the many ways farmers can mitigate the effects of climate change. Join us as we delve further into this issue from a cropping perspective hosted by AOL Technical Officer Josefine Pettersson.

The cropping industry, through the leadership of the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) have invested in CSIRO research towards climate resilience for grains.

Join AOL Technical Officer Josefine Pettersson as she talks to Professor Terry Rose, who brings a wealth of knowledge behind intercropping and other plant based solutions for potential sequestration. Professor Rose will discuss his research under the Soil CRC. Josefine will also speak with Dr Maartje Sevenster, lead researcher behind the Australian Grains Baseline and Mitigation Assessment report from the CSIRO. This is to be followed by a discussion with Fiona McCredie, Policy and Sustainability Manager for peak industry body GrainGrowers, about the Grains Sustainability Framework that has been devised to strengthen sustainability in the grain industry across the decade until 2030.

 

Questions that will be spoken about

  • What can organic cropping producers do to stay ahead of the sustainability curve?
  • How important are emissions in cropping and how can this be linked with business resilience and yields?

 

About Josefine Pettersson

Josefine Pettersson has a Masters of Organic Agriculture coupled with industry experience in both cropping and livestock. Having worked in the EU and Australia, she brings a new perspective of organic agriculture and insight to advancing opportunities of Australian producers. Having previously worked as a guide, educating tourists about climate change, she is passionate about mitigating greenhouse gas emissions through organic agricultural practices. As part of her Technical Officer role at AOL, she is focused on standards development, sustainability of production and market access to further advance the organic industry.

About Professor Terry Rose

Professor Rose specialises in agronomy and plant nutrition and is based out of Southern Cross University (SCU). He has been a key researcher within the Soil CRC investigating plant based solutions to improve soil performance (cover cropping and intercropping) and increasing nutrient efficiency with organic amendments. Prior to undertaking a PhD, Professor Rose worked as an extension agronomist, plant biosecurity and worked within the SCU based Centre for Organic Research.

Current research areas include:

  • Agronomy and nutrition of aerobic rice
  • Herbicide residues in soils and implications for crop growth
  • Phosphorus efficiency of crop plants, focussing on loading of phosphate into grains
  • Enhanced efficiency fertilisers in the subtropics
  • Cover cropping and intercropping in field crops and horticulture
  • Coffee varietal performance in the Australian subtropics and the Pacific
  • Recycled organics: impacts of amendments on soils and crops
  • Nitrogen efficiency in subtropical sugarcane systems
  • Subtropical grazing systems
  • New high value crops for coastal cropping systems in the subtropics

About Fiona McCredie

Fiona has worked at GrainGrowers for five years as Policy Manager for Sustainability and NRM, and before that as the National Policy Manager. She’s led the development of the Grain Sustainability Framework, working with industry and external stakeholders to define and promote the industry’s sustainability credentials. Over the last few years, she’s shaped GrainGrowers’ Climate Change Policy and developed reports on carbon and cropping and an assessment of current carbon calculators.

Prior to GrainGrowers, Fiona has over 20 years working in policy and investor relations positions in agriculture in the dairy and grains industries, in both commercial and farm lobby organisations. She has an agricultural science degree and an executive MBA and was a board member of Milk Marketing (NSW) and Australian Women in Agriculture.

About Dr Maartje Sevenster

As part of CSIRO’s Climate Smart Agriculture group, Dr Sevenster works on the quantification of direct and indirect impacts of agriculture and other economic activities. The aim is to make this kind of information accessible to a range of stakeholders so they can improve decision making. Her main area of expertise is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) which provides a framework to quantify environmental, social and economic impacts of a system. Agriculture and food are both driving climate change and strongly impacted by it, and the goal is to make the role of externalities, such as ecosystem services, in problems as well as solutions, more visible.

Maartje is leading projects focusing on improving environmental accounting for Australian agriculture, developing the Farmprint tool and working with a broad group of stakeholders on defining a common greenhouse-gas accounting methodology. As part of the Trusted Agrifood Exports mission, she is leading an evaluation of the increasing role of sustainability metrics in trade and market access. Maartje was on the board of the Australian LCA Society for 8 years until 2021.