The seemingly audacious goal of carbon-neutral beef production is already being realized by the forward-thinking.
Meet farmer Bob Davie of Bimbadeen in Gippsland, Victoria, who along with his wife Anne has put into practice today what seems like the work of science fiction — creating a carbon positive beef operation. This means he's putting more carbon into the soil than greenhouse gases (GHG) are being emitted, and all while producing clean, delicious and high-quality grassfed beef.
So how do they do it? As Bob would be the first to point out, it didn't happen overnight. At Bimbadeen they've been carbon accounting and measuring greenhouse gas emissions since 2009. After five years of intensive work to improve cattle productivity and sequester more carbon, the scales were tipped to carbon positivity. Planting vegetation and pastures with deeper roots helps to pull more carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it into the soil, and there are all sorts of measures a farm can take to reduce emissions. The 2017 numbers showed that Bob had done the equivalent of taking 2,144 cars off the road! It will take the long, hard and focused work of many more farmers like Bob and Anne to make the Australian beef industry's 2030 goal of carbon neutrality a reality...but it can be done.