RECENTLY I presented my policy, ‘Restore the Soil: Prosper the Nation’ to the federal Agriculture and Water Resources Minister David Littleproud and I’ve been heartened by the enthusiastic response to my recommendations.
Positive feedback has also come from many quarters - farm leaders, farmers, and the online community.
Many have welcomed the ‘whole of government’ approach to restoring our agricultural farmland to its former productive and healthy status.
The report will be considered soon by the Agricultural Council of federal, state and territory Agricultural Ministers at a meeting on April 27.
This is an important step in developing an overarching agricultural land management policy, because our state and territory governments are responsible for much of Australia’s landscape, and implementing this report will provide substantial economic, environmental and social benefits to farmers and the nation.
State and territory governments also control the school curricula and one of my key recommendations is for school gardens to be established in every primary and junior high school as a national school garden program, implemented through the Australian curriculum.
But the policy goes a lot further, and results from my meetings with thousands of farmers across the country over the past five years.
Without exception, they want to leave their landscapes in better condition than they found them.
However, they need greater community understanding and support to do it and that means having governments and their local communities on their side.
The need to act is becoming more urgent.
Our work through Soils For Life reveals that, across 60 per cent of our agricultural landscape, there is a need to address such issues as declining levels of soil carbon, soil acidification, erosion and inadequate stream and water management.
Immediate and ongoing action is needed to ensure that Australian agriculture can continue to be productive, clean and profitable, and to demonstrate the use of sustainable management.
And this requires some big actions by big thinkers.
My report includes a national objective to ‘restore and maintain the health of the Australian agricultural landscape’.
It provides a series of recommendations aimed at properly integrating the management of our key strategic soil, water and plant assets, fundamental to maximising agricultural productivity and prosperity, noting that mismanaging any one will mean the other two will inevitably fail.
It also recommends a big idea – that our water, our soil and vegetation assets are so important that all three should be declared as key national, natural strategic assets, to be managed accordingly and in an integrated way.
My meetings with overseas leaders, including President Xi Jinping, have convinced me that regenerative agriculture - which often involves simple changes to farm management - will further enhance our reputation as high quality and reliable producers of food and fibre.
Increasingly, we must demonstrate widespread use of the sustainable management practices our trading partners are now looking for, and to build the resilience we need to adapt to climate change and associated extremes in weather.
‘Restore the Soil: Prosper the Nation’ report:
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