Member for Bendigo Lisa Chesters, North Central CMA program delivery executive manager Rachel Murphy and Phip and Lizzie Murray.
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A $1.8 million federally backed program is moving into its on-farm trial phase across Victoria’s north-central region, with farmers beginning to test new approaches to climate-smart agriculture.
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The Climate Positive Farming Initiative is being led by the North Central Catchment Management Authority, with funding from the Federal Government's Natural Heritage Trust.
It is working with 26 farmers to explore practical, farmer-led solutions to an increasingly variable climate, focusing on common challenges including soil health, land degradation, water-use efficiency and re-vegetation.
At its core, the initiative is designed to put decision-making in the hands of farmers themselves.
Rather than prescribing a single solution, it enables producers to test ideas that suit their own operations, supported by technical advice and ongoing monitoring from the North Central CMA.
With trials now under way, the first results are expected later this year.
For the CMA, the emphasis is on generating knowledge that can flow back into the farming community, with trials expected to build a foundation for future changes.
Phip and Lizzie Murray run cattle on their Langley property.
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For Langley farmer Phip Murray, the program offered a chance to examine her soil’s health at a finer scale than she could have managed alone.
“The Climate Positive Farming Initiative seemed a good opportunity to explore biological agronomy with an aim to rebalance our soil and improve soil health,” she said.
“Our soil tests have indicated our soils are unbalanced, and this initiative enables a structured way to test the outcomes of various inputs on our pastures and animals and, in turn, to glean insights about the cost-benefit ratio.”
Cohuna dairy farmers Colin and Jodie Hay are taking part in the project, exploring the use of organic fertilisers on their pasture crops.
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Andy Vukosav
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For Cohuna dairy farmers Colin and Jodie Hay, the program is an opportunity to explore practices that can improve returns, while also delivering sustainability gains.
The Hays operate a 2500-hectare dairy and cropping property, milking around 430 cows within a mixed ration feeding system supported by compost barns and feed pads.
Despite the scale of the operation, the trial they have chosen is deliberately small.
“It’s really quite a small trial. It’s only five hectares,” Ms Hay said.
The trial compares two, five-hectare plots growing feed for the dairy herd.
One follows conventional practices using synthetic fertilisers, while the other relies solely on biological inputs, compost, worm castings and products supplied by Nutrisoil, to test whether soil biology can take on more of the work traditionally done by synthetic fertilisers.
“We’re going to be trying to reduce our reliance on synthetic fertilisers,” Ms Hay said.
“How do we farm with less inputs, and let some of the biology look after itself?”
The trial will run over three years and be closely monitored by North Central CMA staff and agronomy specialists.
For Ms Hay, caution is essential in an industry where margins are tight and conditions can shift quickly.
“Do a small trial first and then expand it out,” she said.
Rising input costs are adding urgency to that thinking.
Fertiliser prices in particular have surged in recent years, forcing producers to reconsider how their systems operate.
At the same time, growing consumer interest in sustainably produced food is creating new incentives for change.
“The pressure of the cost of our inputs, they’ve just gone crazy,” Ms Hay said.
“As well as that, customers are now more interested in how we produce their food.”
Importantly, both farmers were able to shape their own approach within the program’s framework, a feature the program’s coordinators built in deliberately.
“We were able to decide what project we would do. It was fairly open-ended, within a framework,” Ms Hay said.
That flexibility, combined with real-farm data collected over coming seasons, is what the North Central CMA hopes will make the results meaningful, not just for the 26 participating farmers, but for the agricultural community that watches on.
