Environmental plantings are no longer just about carbon offsets. When integrated into farm systems, they can stack returns: carbon, biodiversity, productivity, and resilience. Here, Hugh Killen explains how the right design can turn ecological restoration into return.
By Hugh Killen, Managing Director and CEO, Impact Ag Australia
Once upon a time, government policy paid Australian farmers to clear trees. Now, it pays us to plant them. This isn’t just a new set of rules; it’s a profound shift in the way land-use value is created. Under the ACCU Scheme, reforestation projects can generate carbon credits, while the Nature Repair Market offers certificates for biodiversity outcomes.
For the first time, farmers are being financially rewarded for services we’ve always provided: storing carbon, protecting habitat, and stewarding ecosystems.
It’s an important correction, but also a complex one. Because these opportunities don’t exist in isolation. They land squarely in the middle of productive farm businesses, raising a fundamental question: can environmental plantings create new income without compromising the food and fibre that remain agriculture’s core business?
From trade-off, to asset
Plantings have often been viewed as a trade-off: trees vs crops, habitats vs livestock. In reality, when designed well, environmental plantings can provide multiple on-farm benefits to the production system:
These are compounding benefits. Over time they build resilience into the system – like deposits in a natural capital bank account – making farms better able to withstand climate variability and more attractive to markets that value sustainability. In the right place, environmental plantings aren’t a concession to ‘the green side’ of politics. They’re an asset that strengthens both resilience and profitability.
Plantings that work with production
Eyes wide open, here: there are real risks with environmental plantings. They could displace food and fibre production, taking high-value cropping or grazing land out of production. They could also:
- Fragment farm operations and reduce operational flexibility, making it harder to adapt to seasonal conditions.
- Create monocultures that lead to ecological imbalances.
- And expose land managers to market volatility by relying on single-credit streams.
But these aren’t inevitable outcomes. They’re design risks. And the solution lies in integration: taking a whole-of-farm view and matching the right project to the right part of the landscape.
Enabling technology and emerging markets
The tools to get this right are sharper than ever. Digital twins (like Agronomeye’s ‘birds eye view’ of the farm), remote sensing, and carbon modelling allow us to identify where plantings complement productivity, rather than compete with it.
Markets are evolving, too. At our environmental planting in south-west NSW, we’re applying an Accounting for Nature method where biodiversity outcomes don’t just add to, but enhance carbon credit value. Dual-purpose plantings are emerging, too: systems that sequester carbon, provide habitat, and, with certain methods, producing biomass for energy – all without taking prime agricultural land out of production.
Stacking benefits – for the farm of the future
Our approach begins with a natural capital opportunity assessment, mapping land capability and matching it to the most suitable mix of enterprises. This might include:
The test is simple: If a project improves soil health, increases biodiversity, generates new revenue sources, and maintains or enhances farm productivity and profitability through the integration of grazing activities, it’s a win. If it compromises the productive heart of the farm, the design isn’t finished yet.
A call for integrated thinking
The recognition farmers are now receiving for their environmental services is long overdue. But credits are only part of the story. The bigger opportunity is to redefine productivity itself – to see farms as systems that return across food, fibre, carbon, biodiversity, and long-term value. All at once.
Because, when done right, environmental plantings and productive agriculture don’t compete. They compound, like deposits in a natural capital bank account that pays dividends in resilience, profitability, and ecological health for generations.
That’s how we’ll take agriculture to its $100 billion by 2030 target – and position it for growth beyond.
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