Bob Wilson's dramatic experience with grasses

Mr Wilson—I am a farmer from Lancelin, which is in the northern agricultural region ofWestern Australia, about 150 kilometres north of Perth.As a farmer, in 1985 I realised that the traditional annual based agriculturalsystem that we were working with was failing. I moved to trial some new and innovative perennial systems that were based around a fodder shrub called tagasaste, which is a deep rooted perennial shrub. Over a period of years we planted around 1,000 hectares on the farm. By 2003 we started planting some subtropical perennial grasses, again to try and adapt what was happening with our past system so as to move from an annual based system to a more perennial-based farming system.

In 2007 we measured some of the soil carbon under these systems and we compared them with the soil carbon levels that were under our annual based pasture system. It showed indications of a sequestration rate on an annualised basis of around seven tonnes of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year. If you consider that we had 1,000 hectares of tagasaste, that equates to around 7,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year being sequestered. A rough figure, to give you an indication, is that half of my farm would be taking out the equivalent of the emissions of around 1,000 cars. We then decided that we had better try and look at emissions versus sequestrations on a whole farm budget. Through some fairly rough figuring we came up with our emissions for the farm at that stage being about 2,000 tonnes. So we are working onabout 5,000 tonnes actually being sequestered. We feel that we have the potential under these systems to actually make a difference.

Farming needs to change. We keep operating in the same way. If soil carbon is given the opportunity to be part of the new emissions trading scheme then I think that the farming industry can change and can adapt much quicker. In the 20 years that I have been growing tagasaste, about 100,000 hectares have been planted in Western Australia. In the five years that we have been mucking around with subtropical perennial grasses, probably about 30,000 hectares have
been planted. That is great for a start, but if climate change is happening as quickly as we believe it is then that will not cut the mustard. We have to adapt quicker, and farming has the potential to be part of the solution and not the problem.