Making carbon while the sun shines
DROUGHT HASN’T stopped Peter Yench from reaping almost $1 million a year, pre-tax, from his farm in Cobar, north-western New South Wales, for each of the past three years. With good rainfall this year the 21,000ha property, Bulgoo, is now lush, green and looking, the 75-year-old farmer boasts, “like God’s own country”.
But up until late last year it was as parched and grey as hundreds of pastoral properties that had endured years of drought in this semi-arid zone. Peter runs sheep on Bulgoo and from 2016 to 2019 his flock dropped from 8000 to 600 as the property’s carrying capacity dried up along with the water in its dams and its soil. And yet that six-figure cheque kept arriving annually. Better still, it’s destined to keep coming for at least the next decade, no matter what weather conditions prevail. Peter’s farming success is in a block of about 10,000ha set aside on Bulgoo that supports an open woodland dominated by eucalypts–native vegetation that’s evolved to cope with droughts. It’s the kind of scrub that’s traditionally been cleared out here to make way for pasture or crops.
About a decade ago Peter entered into an agreement under the Carbon Farming Initiative, as the federal government began exploring innovative carbon capture options to reduce the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. He locked in a vegetation management plan for his property that avoided native vegetation clearing. And the big pay-offs began a few years later with the 2015 launch of the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), which provides financial incentives for greenhouse gas mitigation.
The ERF facilitates ways to measure and pay) out of the atmosphere and locking away the carbon component–or preventing the release of CO in the first place.
