Enabling Agricultural Traceability through Data Interoperability

DATA INTEROPTABILITY FRAMEWORK SUBMISSION on behalf of
FARMING FOR THE FUTURE

As the agricultural sector evolves with advancing technology and increasing demands for
transparency and efficiency, the imperative for robust data interoperability is becoming more
pronounced. Establishing a standardised framework for data interoperability not only enhances the
traceability of agricultural products but also should accelerate the emergence of technology to
support data collection and sharing to foster greater collaboration, transparency, and innovation
through the entire supply chain. Importantly, the harmonisation of conceptual and quantitative data
will ensure that measurements are interpreted consistently across different systems, with the use of
standardised formats, protocols, and interfaces. This interoperability empowers farmers, regulators,
and consumers with real-time access to crucial data, facilitating informed decision-making,
optimising resource allocation, and ultimately driving productivity gains as well as public benefits
including improved agricultural resilience.

Currently within the agricultural sustainability sector, there are no uniform data sharing
arrangements; no standards for data interoperability; and varying levels of governance capability
amongst data providers and users. In general, publicly available data has varying levels of
sustainability, usability, and accessibility. A national approach to streamlining data collection and
sharing will enable efficient and adaptive supply chains, and incentives for participants to uptake and
demonstrate sustainable agricultural practices. Standardised metrics will be better supported by
technology, making measurement and reporting cost-effective and easy for farmers and the supply
chain to use.

ABOUT US

Farming for the Future is a research and change program seeking to create more sustainable farm
businesses, improve environmental outcomes, and support a thriving rural and regional Australia. The
program is supported by a multidisciplinary research team of scientists, economists and farm
advisors, with an intention to create the national-scale evidence that connects natural capital
management and farm profitability. The program was borne of a clear and urgent need to develop the
business case for measuring, valuing, and investing in natural capital. Farming for the Future aims to
provide the evidence and practical support that farmers need to embed natural capital in mainstream
farm management practices, and to activate the supply chain to encourage and reward that shift.

The Farming for the Future program recognises the need for robust data interoperability and the
establishment of a standardised framework. By fostering transparency and trust throughout the
supply chain, data interoperability paves the way for enhanced market access, increased
competitiveness, and sustained economic growth within the agricultural sector. A key outcome of the
Farming for the Future program has been the development of a suite of evidence-based metrics that
enable farms to quantify various aspects of their environmental performance, as well as natural
capital and biodiversity outcomes. With the support of philanthropy, Meat and Livestock Australia
(MLA) and Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) these metrics have been road-tested on 130 grazing and
cropping farms across south-east Australia. With further support from AWI, Farming for the Future has
undertaken independent research to assess the interoperability of these metrics to meet the needs of
multiple industry-level sustainability schemes. This has been achieved through assessing the degree
to which these metrics meet the requirements of 18 key existing national and international reporting

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and market certification schemes relevant to Australian farmers (wool, cotton, sheep, beef). These
schemes play a crucial role in connecting farmers and brands that share a sustainability focus. They
will also be increasingly important in market moderation following recent European legislation
requiring all products to adhere to official certification schemes in order to use sustainability labels.

The information required to meet environmental and sustainability schemes varies widely. For
example, some schemes are based on qualitative, practice-based measures, such as requirements
for farms to have management plans documenting their environmental management and/or animal
welfare practices. Others are underpinned by quantitative, outcome-based metrics, such as those
that require farmers to report on the greenhouse gas emissions of their farm enterprise using per-unit-
output measures. These different levels of information may serve different purposes: qualitative
measures may help guide management practices, whereas robust, evidence-based indicators may
also inform management and are necessary to inform industry investment. The recent European
legislation, however, highlights a likely move towards requiring more quantitative information from
farmers in the future.

Irrespective of the type of information required by schemes, almost all require farmers to demonstrate
the performance of their enterprises in multiple areas, such as greenhouse gas emissions, natural
capital (nature), and animal welfare and biodiversity. Navigating the requirements of different
schemes, and collating the information they require, is complicated, time-consuming and costly.
Hence there is a pressing need for robust and readily available outcomes-based measures of farm
sustainability that are easy to quantify, scientifically based, verifiable and low cost. Furthermore,
quantitative measures of farm sustainability that meet the requirements of multiple schemes will
benefit farmers and provide transparency to reporting schemes. Opportunities exist for greater
coherence between schemes so that the metrics used to measure different types of farm
performance (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions, natural capital status, animal welfare outcomes) meet
the requirements of multiple schemes.

Over the last six months, we assessed the degree to which the Farming for the Future metrics align
with the requirements of (i.e. are interoperable with) these national and international industry
reporting frameworks and certification schemes and noted any gaps or conflicts between the FftF
metrics and scheme requirements, specifically as they relate to natural capital, environmental
performance and biodiversity. We approached the question of interoperability from two perspectives:

1. Conceptual interoperability – the alignment of metrics based on the measurement
goal/purpose. This is applicable where practice-based or qualitative data is required.
2. Conversion interoperability – where metrics prepared by one method could be converted
(recalculated) to another. This is applied to quantitative data.

The metrics used by the Farming for the Future program are calculated using publicly available,
remotely sensed data, on-farm management records and, in a few cases, on-ground observations. All
provide outcome-based measures at whole-of-farm level, or per-unit-of-product levels. They reflect
outcomes of the entire farm enterprise, as opposed to paddock-level outcomes and they have a
foundation in current science. The suite of 28 metrics comprehensively reflects different components
of sustainability, including natural capital, animal welfare, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon
sequestration, resource use efficiency and biodiversity. Each metric can be used to guide
management decisions on individual farm properties, contribute to farm-level reporting, and reporting
by supply chains into international markets.

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As a public good initiative, Farming for the Future is not designed to compete with certification
schemes. It has been designed to advance methods of accelerating the emergence of open standard,
publicly available, widely adopted, decision-useful and cost-effective methods of measuring farm
natural capital and environmental performance for others to use to empower farmers to interact
successfully with markets. As part of this, with support from AWI and the Macdoch Foundation it has
invested in research to understand the metrics and measures required by a range of reporting and
certification schemes operating in agriculture at present. Farming for the Future has formed the view
that there is considerable scope for these metrics to act interoperably to provide both a standard
experience for farmers and also continue to address the needs of multiple industry-level sustainability
schemes.

To assess this, we addressed three objectives:

1. Provide insights to the level of agreement in the metrics required by key existing national and
international reporting and market certification schemes relevant to Australian graziers
(sheep, beef) and fibre producers (wool, cotton), and;
2. Align these with a summary of the Farming for the Future metrics relating to designed to be
comprehensive, science-based and robust measures of farm natural capital (including animal
welfare), environmental performance and biodiversity, and;
3. Assess the degree to which these metrics are interoperable with the requirements of key
existing national and international reporting and market certification schemes relevant to
Australian graziers (sheep, beef) and fibre producers (wool, cotton).

We found that the prospects for achieving a robust, comprehensive and practical set of metrics that
satisfied the leading scheme were good. Further, we conclude that applying a pathway of
interoperability of metrics could accelerate the emergence of open standards for measurement of
agricultural natural capital and environmental performance.

Farming for the Future perceives significant public good arising from investment in the acceleration of
broadly adopted, widely available ways of measuring natural capital and environmental performance
for Australian producers. These include, but are not limited to:

• Open standards for measurement is likely to reduce the barriers to entry for agricultural
certification and verification schemes, reducing switching cost and enhancing competition
between schemes.
• Harmonised or interoperability in nature measurements is likely to lead to acceleration of
development and competition in ag-tech and nature-tech to reduce the cost of measurement
and improve the utility to farmers.
• The improvement in the ability for producers to include information about natural capital and
environmental performance in their economic decisions about how they improve the health of
productive landscapes and the resilience of rural communities.

Further information about the metrics used in Farming for the Future follows.

The Farming for the Future program has categorised data metrics according to how they relate to on-
farm sustainability; these categories are:
1. Natural capital
2. Environmental performance
3. Biodiversity

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Natural Capital

Farming for the Future has defined nine metrics that quantify on-farm natural capital assets at a whole
farm level. These metrics reflect the condition of farms in relation to soil health, aquatic systems,
livestock forage and ecological function. They also include metrics measuring the overall extent and
aggregation of woody vegetation on farms, and the degree to which this vegetation provides shade and
shelter for livestock and crops. Collectively, these metrics reflect the capacity of a farm’s natural
capital to provide the ecosystem services that support agricultural production, enhance animal
welfare, and support biodiversity. Most of these metrics can be calculated using readily available
remote-sensing information and so are efficient to capture. Natural capital metrics can be used to
track change over time in farm-level natural capital, enabling farmers to explore trends in the
relationship between production outputs and natural capital over time.

Environmental Performance

Farming for the Future has defined 16 environmental performance metrics which can be grouped into
two broad categories: metrics relating to greenhouse gas emissions, and to resource use efficiency.
Metrics of greenhouse gas emissions comprise those relating to Scope 1 (direct emissions from
sources owned or controlled by the farm), Scope 2 (indirect emissions resulting from farm use of
purchased energy), and selected Scope 3 (indirect emissions resulting from other farm activities)
emissions, and also carbon sequestration across the farm. Metrics of resource use efficiency relate to
the use of renewable and non-renewable resources across the farm, as well as pollution (land and
water) generated during production. Environmental performance metrics provide verifiable,
quantitative measures of farm-level environmental performance to guide management and facilitate
reporting by supply chains.

Biodiversity

Farming for the Future utilises existing datasets such as land-cover mapping and on-farm
management records to measure the degree to which a farm is being managed to maintain or improve
biodiversity. This is the approach taken with the Biodiversity Management Index which integrates
information on five key components known to influence biodiversity at a farm scale; habitat extent,
riparian areas and wetlands, farm-scale heterogeneity, grazing pressure, and intensity of synthetic
inputs. Metrics for biodiversity management can be used to track change in biodiversity over time at
the farm-scale, and as such provide a means for farmers and supply chains to demonstrate the
biodiversity credentials of individual farms and understand how this relates to farm profitability.
The Farming for the Future program has assessed the interoperability of these 28 metrics, determining
the degree to which they align with data requirements of 18 leading national and international industry
reporting frameworks and certification schemes. Each metric was assessed according to the
‘information concept/s’ it was most closely aligned with, as based on its measurement goal/ purpose
or underlying data. The Australian Agricultural Sustainability Framework (AASF) was used to provide
an independent set of ‘information concepts’ as represented by ‘Category/ Principle’. This framework
was selected as being appropriate for this purpose because it has broad relevance to all agricultural
industries in Australia, and its categories and principles encompass the breadth of information
concepts covered by the Farming for the Future metrics.

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The Australian Agricultural Sustainability Framework (AASF) is the first country-specific
framework to address sustainability from a whole-of-agriculture perspective. It is being
developed to provide benefits to farmers and the community by promoting best practice in
agricultural sustainability and ensuring these efforts can be recognised by international
markets and the community. The AASF needs to be supported with robust and logically
connected mechanisms for governing data sharing activities. This would require the
definition of use cases, appropriate institutional arrangements, and instilling a culture of
trust and collaboration that enables the AASF community, data policies, and information
systems to effectively function.

The interoperability of Farming for the Future metrics with the requirements of each framework/
scheme was assessed using publicly available information provided by that framework or scheme.
Farming for the Future metrics were considered to be interoperable with a given framework/ scheme
when they aligned with either the information concept, or the specific data, required by the
framework/ scheme. Determining interoperability involved recognition of separate ‘conceptual’ and
‘quantitative’ datasets, and the benefit of harmonising these to ensure that measurements are
interpreted consistently across different systems. Importantly, while quantitative data is more robust,
transparent, and verifiable, it does not always provide the depth and/ or breadth of conceptual
information contained in farm management plans.

The results of the interoperability assessment have been promising, with all 28 metrics providing
information on concepts for at least some of the 18 frameworks and schemes. Farming for the Future
has concluded that there is considerable scope for these metrics to act interoperably to provide both
a standard experience for farmers and continue to address the needs of multiple sustainability
schemes. The Data Interoperability Framework proposed by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries
and Forestry will certainly enable consistent traceability in agricultural supply chains and show
domestic and international consumers and governments, that Australian agricultural products are
safe, clean, and sustainable from paddock to plate, which will drive our access to premium markets.
There is considerable scope for the Farming for the Future program to support framework
development and creation of a robust interoperable suite of metrics for inclusion, that are science-
based, verifiable and cost effective for growers to use.

RECOMMENDATIONS

By incorporating the "intel chip" concept, we can develop a standardised, interoperable framework
that serves as the foundation for various technological solutions while allowing for differentiation
among products and services in the market. The seamless exchange of data between various
technologies and service providers will promote efficiency, consistency, and reliability in
measurement practices. Combining standardised interoperability with flexibility for differentiation will
enable technology to reduce costs while still catering to diverse market needs and segments. This
approach fosters innovation, accessibility, and competitiveness in a framework of continuous
improvement and collaboration, creating an enduring benefit for the entire agricultural value chain.

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