New program by WA Government helps farmers with upfront costs of tree planting and other carbon projects

The State Government has taken a significant step towards its goal of net zero emissions by 2050 by offering upfront funds to help farmers embrace carbon farming. Agriculture Minister Alannah MacTiernan announced today that farmers in the South West Land Division would be able to access upfront payments to undertake land restoration projects and tap into the burgeoning market for carbon credits. Through the $15 million Carbon Farming and Land Restoration Program — a key initiative of the WA State Climate Policy — farmers will receive funds to develop re-vegetation programs or move to farming systems that build soil carbon. That would be in exchange for an agreed number of Australian Carbon Credit Units expected to be generated within the term of the agreement. Excess and future ACCUs belong to the farmer. Farmers will need to kick in 30 per cent of the total funding request. Ms MacTiernan said the program had been specifically designed to help farmers overcome financial barriers to entering the carbon market. She said the aim was to increase WA’s carbon storage and drive long term sustainable agricultural production. Corrigin farmer Simon Wallwork, also chair of WA’s AgZero 2030 effort, described it as a step in the right direction, saying there was strong interest from farmers. “Farmers will generally proceed with caution as we really need to understand which parts of the landscape we should plant back to trees, and we don’t want to be locking good land up,” he said. Mr Wallwork said in his own situation, about 5 per cent of his farm was not profitable to grow crops. “At the moment we fund our own tree planting so the fact there may be some funding to re vegetate parts of our farm, that’s certainty an incentive for us,” he said. Mr Wallwork said the priority on his farm was to become carbon neutral, with market signals indicating this would be important going forward. “We don’t want to necessarily sell all of the carbon credits we generate as we will need some of these ourselves,” he said. “And this is about offsetting emissions, we still need to be working on the mitigation side as well.” Ms MacTiernan said it was exciting that WA farmers could be leaders in carbon sequestration, putting agriculture at the forefront of solving the problem of global climate change. “This is about making agriculture, the act of growing things, carbon neutral — indeed I think carbon negative — so we can become a sink to help the rest of the community get to net zero emissions by 2050,” she said. James Schultz from GreenCollar, a leading environmental markets developer, said WA had “huge potential” to become the leading carbon market in Australia. He said the State’s carbon market was predicted to grow into the hundreds of millions over the next decade. “Carbon farming is the way of the future, as it not only brings significant agricultural benefits, but also a multitude of environmental and socio-economic co-benefits such as greater pastoral and farm-gate returns, improved biodiversity, community advancement and local jobs,” the chief executive said. The first round of the carbon farming program is open for expressions of interest until August 20.