Call to test grassfed beef environmental credentials platform

Producers of grassfed beef are invited to take part in a pilot phase to test a sustainability platform that measures sustainable production practices on-farm and provides environmental credentials for benchmarking and trading.

The platform incorporates mechanisms to determine carbon balance and biodiversity, while delivering access to learning modules under five environmental themes of carbon, tree cover, ground cover, drought resilience and biodiversity stewardship.

Interested producers and industry stakeholders will be taken through the pilot program in online webinars between June and September 2023, and asked to provide feedback on its useability to ensure it meets the requirements of the supply chain.

The program has been developed by a consortium of Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), the University of Queensland and World Wildlife Fund, and is funded by the National Landcare Program’s Smart Farming Partnerships initiative.

MLA Project Manager of Environmental Markets, Katelyn Lubcke, said the credentials platform, which will be voluntary, was poised to deliver "enormous value" for the entire beef supply chain.

“We are seeing an increase each year in our domestic consumer sentiment data that indicates Australian consumers want to purchase products with environmental and animal welfare credentials. This platform addresses the lack of an industry-designed, voluntary framework and/or mechanism that enables producers to demonstrate these credentials in a trusted way,” she said.

“The platform’s unique point of difference is that we’ve enabled beef producers from across the country to scope each theme and provide meaningful insights as to what is feasibly measurable at a farm scale, and the types of results that indicate good management and ongoing improvement.

“We see the platform becoming a key entry point into specific labelled beef brands across the country. It provides a mechanism for processors to select and support suppliers based on their environmental performance.”

As well as facilitating continual improvement and practice change support, the program will enable processors and brands to use the credentials of their suppliers in their business reporting, for example, the number of suppliers who are in the top tier for biodiversity.

Ms Lubcke said the overall response to the piloting has been positive, with industry keen to look for new ways to measure and report on-farm environmental performance in a meaningful way. Providing a mechanism that is collecting robust data enables usage across the value chain.

“Once a producer has achieved their credentials they have the functionality to share it with a processor, retailer, or financial institution, or they can share the data to a de-identified dashboard to allow Natural Resource Management (NRM) region benchmarking. If the producer does not wish to share the data, they don’t have to,” she said.

Users who take part in the pilot program will join a webinar at a date and time of their choosing and be given an overview of the platform’s capability, then taken into breakout rooms and given proxy data sets to use to interact with the platform. They’ll be asked to complete a feedback form to indicate which components they liked, why, and how and where improvements could be made.

Ms Lubcke said there was enormous value in MLA’s position as the consortium lead as the industry looks to MLA for direction on frameworks such as Australian Beef Sustainability Framework, Meat Standards Australia, and Livestock Production Assurance.

“This is another example of MLA supporting the development of something that can be utilised at the discretion of various beef supply chains, and that will enable market and community recognition of beef producers as environmental stewards,” she said.

While the platform should be completed in October 2023, Ms Lubcke said it was likely to be refined further to incorporate the feedback from users before its launched by December 2023.