Status: Phase 1 completed; Phase 2 to be commenced in 2009/10.

Research provider – name & contact details
Allison Clark, Houston’s Farm, aclark@houstonsfarm.com.au

Start & finish dates for project
June 2008 – June 2009

What is the project?

Development of a carbon calculation tool for the Australian Vegetable Industry and standard protocols for the tailoring of the tool to the rest of the horticulture industry.

Why did we do it?

Management and assessment of greenhouse gas emissions for the horticulture industry is a high priority for the HAL Environment Portfolio. Prior to this project, there has been no industry investment in this area to date. The first step for mitigation is to identify where the major emissions are occurring, and which of these can practically and economically be changed.

Houston’s Farm is a fully integrated grower and processor of fresh cut salads supplying over 1400 major retail outlets nationally in addition to food service. Following awareness of the retail focus in UK and US supermarkets on food miles and the growing debate in Australia on greenhouse gas, Houston’s Farm developed a strategy to understand more about this issue by analysing its carbon (GHG) footprint using product life cycle analysis. In 2007 Houston’s Farm was the inaugural winner of the Woolworths Fresh Food Grant in recognition of its strategy and chose to leverage award funds by investing in a project through Horticultural Australia Limited (HAL) to develop a project of wider significance.

The Houston’s Farm strategy included a plan to develop a calculation tool which could be extended to the Australian vegetable industry and develop greater understanding of GHG through a single validated approach. This would avoid duplication for industry participants who have previously been subject to varied compliance requirements from multiple quality assurance systems.

The Houston’s Farm project was developed on the basis that there was no known literature available within the Australian vegetable industry which suggested that an analysis of environmental sustainability and carbon accounting had been performed through the supply chain from seed to supermarket. This was seen to be significant, as the Australian vegetable industry could not afford to take a fragmented approach to carbon accounting and environmental sustainability.
Cohesion of knowledge, interpretation, and application of GHG accounting within the vegetable industry was considered to be vital as industry came to terms with a wide range of global impacts including the perception of consumers. The three stages of the Houston’s Farm project were designed to develop a base from which industry could move to avoid confusion and contribute to the options available for agribusiness or farming enterprises at any level.

How did we do it?

The project commenced in June 2008 and was broken down into three stages – the development of the tool using Houston’s Farm modelling, development of a simple interface to enable adoption across industry, and dissemination to industry.

Stage 1 (June 2008-June 2009) has been completed with the development of the tool for Houston’s Farm. Stages 2 & 3 (July 2009-June 2011) are ready to commence; this involves the modification of the Houston’s Farm tool into a more widely applicable Vegetable Carbon Footprinting Tool and will include dissemination to industry through an education process.

The Houston’s Farm Carbon Footprinting Tool

The model is provided as a primary Excel spreadsheet including a carbon capital worksheet. Worksheets building the Houston’s Farm model include Transport (by weeks of the year and destination), Setup (capital, crop types, crop sites), Water (including source, energy use in circulating, rainfall and evaporation data), Tractors (including tractor movements and preventive maintenance), Fertilisers and sprays (including breakdown by crop type), Administration (office consumables, energy, and staff travel), Processing (including thermal load calculation for refrigeration and climatic data), Block maps (percentage of crop type grown in area), and Crop modelling (planting and growth inputs and outputs). The model was developed as a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model using a single factor for global warming potential of CO2 equivalents.

In its current form, the tool meets the needs of Houston’s Farm and will form the basis of financial cost/benefit and GHG cost benefit analysis for budget preparations and their business management strategy moving forward. Future research at Houston’s Farm will focus on ensuring that the tool can assist in mitigating emission factors and present a before/after analysis for all activities explored.

The model is currently intentionally specific to Houston’s Farm and therefore is not currently available for use within the wider vegetable industry. This is the objective of Stages 2 & 3 of the project. Click here for more information.

The potential for wider application of this tool to other horticultural commodities has also been discussed as part of this project. The most important outcome for future applications of this model to different crops and/or farming businesses is that the study identified the complexity of operations for horticulture, most specifically in the variety of other production techniques that were not included in the model and would need to be in the future.

Outcomes:

• Houston’s Farm is a fully integrated grower and processor of fresh cut salads supplying 12 SKUs to 170 Woolworths stores nationally excluding Western Australia.   We are a member of the Australian Freshcut Salad Producers Forum and connect to international companies such as Fresh Express (USA), Langmead Farms (UK), and New Zealand Fresh Cuts.
•  Following awareness of the retail focus in UK and US supermarkets on food miles and the growing debate in Australia on greenhouse gas, Houston’s Farm developed a strategy to understand more about this issue by analyzing its carbon (greenhouse gas) footprint using product life cycle analysis.   In 2007 Houston’s Farm was the inaugural winner of the Woolworths Fresh Food Grant in recognition of its strategy and chose to leverage award funds with Horticultural Australia Limited to develop a project of wider significance.
• The $1 million Woolworths Fresh Food Grant was announced by Woolworths CEO, Michael Luscombe, on the 20th Anniversary of the marketing campaign that launched 'The Fresh Food People' brand (28 June 2007).
• Each year Woolworths offer the opportunity of a grant of $100,000 to an Australian fresh food producer who best demonstrates commercially viable and environmentally sustainable fresh food initiatives.
• The Houston’s Farm strategy included the desire to develop a calculation tool which could be extended to the Australian vegetable industry and develop greater understanding of carbon (greenhouse gas) impacts through a single validated approach.  This would avoid duplication for industry participants who have previously been subject to varied compliance requirements from multiple quality assurance systems.
• Using its fully integrated grower, processor and distribution model, Houston’s Farm incorporated a number of key factors into the project, which included the ability to analyse the relative impact and merit of proposed changes to its production and distribution model and raise awareness for the vegetable industry to develop a method for managing any reporting requirements which may arise.
• To support the development of the tool in stage 1, Houston’s Farm worked with a number of collaboration partners including Pitt & Sherry and ARM. In addition, an international reference group was established to maintain an understanding of how both international and domestic retail markets were positioning in respect to carbon (greenhouse gas) reporting. 
• Houston’s Farm has utilized the tool to model supply chain impacts of constructing a processing facility in Queensland to compliment the processing facility in Cambridge.  In addition, energy audits have been undertaken, with modeling considered to  trigger changes in refrigeration practices.  The Business Management Team now works on the basis of considering cost benefit (financial) in addition to the environmental and carbon impacts of any strategic decisions to be made.

Project Partners