The Australian Government is aiming to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and agriculture has a strong role to play in achieving this target.
Carbon farming and its challenges and opportunities is the focus of the latest episode of the AgTech Revolution series, created by Lightbridge Productions.
Agrifutures managing director John Harvey said setting a baseline and exploring simple methods to start reducing the carbon footprint were steps farmers could take to help meet that goal.
"The government has a target of reducing the carbon footprint by 43 per cent by 2030 and net zero by 2050," Mr Harvey said.
"That's the stick on the ground, that's the target, that's what we're aiming for. And I think we're early in that journey. I think it is going to be harder than what people realise to actually get Australian agriculture to carbon neutral. The only way we can get there in the long term is going to be through innovation."
Deloitte partner, consulting, climate and engineering, Ben Van Delden said agriculture had a fundamental role to play in carbon capture.
"To draw down carbon you need land or water and the industry that manages large tranches of land and water is the agriculture industry," he said. "So we have a fundamental role to play in absorbing more carbon and turning it into good use and improved soil.
"What we're seeing at the moment is a lot more regulatory focus on trying to hold industries to account around the impact they have, the use they have and the restoration they give back to nature. So we're seeing a lot more measurement expectation coming into the agriculture industry."
As an incentive to the farming industry, the Federal Government launched the Emissions Reduction Fund, a $2.5 billion carbon credit scheme to adopt new technologies and practices to help reduce the nation's carbon footprint.
Soil and Land agronomist Edward Scott said there had been more confidence in "above ground" projects, such as avoiding deforestation.
"There's been more confidence in the adoption of the above ground projects, because you can see a tree," he said.
"With soils, it's under your feet, it's out of sight, out of mind. And there's a lot of uncertainty around the measurement and the understanding of the variability across a landscape."
One company that is used to the rigorous requirements of approval processes is Ziltek, pioneers of RemScan, a handheld device used by the global oil and gas industry to accurately detect soil contamination for environmental remediation.
Ziltek chief executive officer Sean Manning said the product had a strong fit in the agricultural space.
"We saw the industry screaming out for cheaper measurement and we know that we're providing cheap soil measurements already to the oil and gas industry," he said.
"Because agriculture was a new industry for us, we didn't want to come barging in pretending to be experts. So we spent a lot of time talking to actual experts and doing a lot of listening."
Food Agility CRC chief scientist Prof David Lamb said farmers can all play a part in helping reduce emissions, and technology would drive it.
"At the end of the day, we know farmers themselves can't solve the world's you carbon problem but we can pull our weight," Prof Lamb said.
