FarmPrint brings practical approach to sustainable agriculture
Unique collaboration helps farmers evaluate their on-farm carbon footprint
With agriculture accounting for some 13 per cent of national carbon emissions, it is clear the sector can make an important contribution to Australia’s transition to a low carbon economy. FarmPrint was developed by the CSIRO, MIRA and the CEFC to demonstrate the potential for data, science and technology to improve agricultural sustainability and reduce emissions on Australian farms.
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FarmPrint brings practical approach to sustainable agriculture
August 2020
FarmPrint is a unique tool designed to enable Australian farmers to monitor, benchmark and evaluate their on-farm carbon footprint, an important step in identifying actions that can lift the sustainability of their farming operations, improving their own FarmPrint.
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MIRA is using its broad portfolio of agricultural assets to pilot FarmPrint and prove up new farming technologies and production processes, paving the way for broader adoption.
FarmPrint is a web-based tool that allows farmers to input operational information about their farm to calculate the intensity of their emissions footprint. Activity data is entered for each crop grown in the reporting year, with the corresponding benchmarking values automatically populated. The data is translated into direct and indirect emissions impacts, supporting better informed decision making.
Following the successful development and testing of FarmPrint on CEFC-related agriculture investments, the CSIRO is actively working to make FarmPrint available to other farmers. This will include allowing users to manually add data and see the results in a web browser, as well as the creating of an Application Programming Interface (API). The API will allow FarmPrint to read data from other software and data sources, greatly reducing the need for manual data entry. It will give users the ability to evaluate a whole portfolio of farms.
Interested users can provide their details via the CSIRO website to receive information on when FarmPrint will be publicly available.
Australian agriculture will increasingly need to provide solid data on the emissions output per unit of production, to meet consumer demand for sustainable products and investor requirements for substantiated evidence of on-farm sustainability, including quantitative metrics. FarmPrint can make an exciting contribution to these activities.
