How Cool Soils changed the way this seed grower farms

Now backed by Mars Pet Care, Manildra, Allied Pinnacle, Charles Sturt University, Food Agility and Sustainable Food Lab and Kellogg's Australia, the Cool Soil Initiative involves 145 farmers, and it's not all about cropping.

The program has attracted interest from graziers, horticulturalists and viticulture, too.

Kellogg Company global agribusiness director Chris Stevens said Cool Soil was an important part of supporting farmers and meeting its own responsible sourcing commitments.

"There's nothing else like this in Australia in terms of this full coverage of the supply chain," he said.

Mr Stevens said Kellogg customers were becoming more interested in sustainable agriculture and "probably a little more vocal about it too".

That didn't mean, he said, that Kellogg had any plans to flex its muscles when it came to grower participation in the program.

"There's no condition that a farmer who supplies to Kellogg's is part of the Cool Soil Initiative, that's that's definitely not the way this works," Mr Stevens said.

Instead, Kellogg hoped farmers would participate "for their own good".

One of the participants is Lilliput Ag director Andrew Russell, a fourth-generation seed grower at Lilliput near Rutherglen on the Victorian side of the Murray.

Mr Russell said about 80 per cent of the enterprise was dedicated to cropping and 20 per cent to livestock but the Cool Soil Initiative had the family rethinking the mix.

"Through this initiative, we're looking at some of the metrics around the livestock component of our business and we're actually looking to bolster that to closer to 70-30 because the livestock component does help put the organic matter back into our system, which leads to organic carbon," he said.

In the last five years, Lilliput Ag has included a legume-based pasture phase stocked with fat lambs in its cropping rotation and had seen a slow increase in its soil carbon levels.

"We've known for the last 20 years with some of the paddocks that have been continually cropped for 30 to 40 years that we have been mining our organic carbon," Mr Russell said.

"We've always grown legumes so we weren't mining things at a really fast rate, but we were mining, so part of the reason we really embraced this project was the opportunity to learn from the information that will be gathered but also from peers on how we can turn things around.

"There's always this willingness to turn things around, but how you can do it economically in a sustainable manner is the challenge and now we're actually we're doing quite a few things which are beneficial to the business."

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The diversification into fat lambs had also helped the business manage risk and the grazing helped control chemical-resistant weeds, he said, while higher soil carbon levels made nutrients more readily available to plants.

Still, finances weren't the number one reason Mr Russell wanted to be involved in the Cool Soil Initiative.

"We're fourth generation, there is a fifth generation out there that hopefully want to come back on to the property at some point but the reality is all of us are motivated to hand over the land to our kids in a better condition," he said.

Not only that, Mr Russell doesn't place much store in the future income potential of carbon trading, and it's not part of the Cool Soil Initiative.

"I see the benefit in in farming more sustainably is going to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint but it's also going to give us the opportunity to market our grain as a product that's been sustainably produced," he said.

"That has far more meaning because if we sell carbon credits, they're gone for 25 years.

"We are never going to have enough carbon in our soil to be able to trade comfortably and not have a problem 25 years down the track where there may not be as much carbon and whoever's then the incumbent who owns the land is potentially faced with a massive bill."

The Cool Soil Initiative will allow farmers to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and conduct other measurements like soil carbon and Mr Stevens said it was so innovative, the model would be promoted throughout Kellogg's global business.

"This particular project is a gold standard for how to really engage with our with our farmers in a meaningful way emission reductions," Mr Stevens said.

"We see the cool soil initiative as a template for us to take from Australia to other parts of the world."