Registrations are now open for our next Community of Practice Webinar. We are excited to come together again for the AASF Community of Practice Online Forum, Monday 17 June 2024. This event is online only and provides the latest updates on AASF activities, findings from the AASF materiality assessment, and progress on the National Agriculture Traceability Grants Program – Sustainability Reporting Uplift Grants.
Project Speakers
Airong Zhang, CSIRO
Developing an interactive tool to assist the participation and implementation of traceability system
The National Agricultural Traceability Strategy 2023 to 2033 aims to strengthen Australia’s biosecurity systems and support agricultural products and value-adding benefits domestically and internationally. However, the implementation of the Strategy relies on producers’ active participation and uptake. While agribusinesses are beginning to understand the merits of traceability, there remains a slow uptake and a lack of understanding of the necessary changes to management practices that enable the adoption of these technologies.
To assist the implementation of traceability system, this project aims to identify the key supporting pillars for traceability adoption by producers and an accompanying assessment tool. The assessment tool will serve a diagnostic, monitoring, and evaluation function for the implementation of traceability systems. At producer level, the assessment will help producers understand their current state of readiness, with relevant information about traceability being provided for educational purpose. At government and industry level, the assessment will assist government and agriculture sectors to identify areas of strength and weakness and develop and evaluate strategies in implementing traceability system.
Marguerite Renouf, Lifecycles
Australian National Life Cycle Inventory Database (AusLCI) – equipping Australian agriculture with sustainability metrics
“Equipping Australian agriculture with LCA-based sustainability metrics” is a joint project by AgriFutures Australia and Lifecycles to strengthen the life cycle inventory (LCI) data available to the agri-food sector for reporting sustainability metrics.
The project will update and extend agricultural LCI data in the Australian Life Cycle Inventory (AusLCI) database to improve the agriculture sector’s access to data needed to respond to requests for greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability reporting.
An important new development will be to ensure that the database is interoperable with the growing range of end uses for sustainability metrics in agri-food supply chains. Therefore a focus of the project is on understanding data flow pathways and aligning the updated data for in-business uses.
The two-year project will:
─ update existing on-farm data in AusLCI (broadacre crops, sugarcane, beef, sheep, and horticulture), to reflect current practices, updated emission factors, and requirements of reporting schemes,
─ add new on-farm data for priority agricultural commodities currently underrepresented in AusLCI (rice, meat chickens, diary, pork, export hay),
─ add new post-farm processing data,
─ identify in-business and supply chain systems that can use sustainability metrics and define the interfaces and data flow pathways need to enable use of AusLCI data.
The outcome will be easier access to LCI data for agriculture and agri-food businesses to communicate their progress toward sustainability goals more effectively with customers, consumers and stakeholders.
