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The Building Hume’s Future Together program commences in Goulburn Mulwaree and aligns to existing Council and NSW Regional plans.
The program is designed to help grow jobs and the economy; regenerate the environment; build the community and improve the supporting infrastructure. The first project under the program is “Grow Goulburn Mulwaree Farms and Gardens” and is intended to help its farmers and residents to adapt to farming and rural life in times of drought and rising temperatures in a way that will improve the environment, create new jobs and build the community. This project will help with one of the most important climate mitigation strategies identified in the Council’s Climate Change Risk Assessment and Adaptation plan, which is to increase the number of trees, bushes and other vegetation to help keep temperatures down. It will help keep down the temperature around domestic dwellings. For farmers the project is launching a Grazing and Farming Group to help farmers adopt Regenerative practices with the objective of improving the return from farming. This is achieved by improving the soil and, hence pastures, drawing down carbon and, in the longer term, encouraging and, ideally, facilitating the sale of carbon credit. Regenerative Grazing is outcomes based and not prescriptive and addresses the pressing need to stop and reverse the loss of carbon in the soil. The recently released paper from the Liberal Party aligned Menzies Research Centre, "From the Ground Up: unleashing the potential of the soil" introduces the term "Resilient Agriculture". Resilient Agriculture is the same as Regenerative Agriculture but avoids any negative connotations that can be associated with the term Regenerative. Hence they should be viewed as the one and the same. Since European settlement Australian agricultural soils have lost about two-thirds of their carbon content. But as soil-carbon expert John White has reported, a 0.5 per cent increase in soil carbon on only 2 per cent of our agricultural lands would more than offset all of Australia’s emissions from all sectors. Advice from Dr John Hewson, chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Development is that this increase to our soil carbon is achievable through the adoption of Regenerative Agriculture. Our “Coping with Extreme Weather Events Workshop” has been resumed following the easing of COVID restrictions, but it will meet all continued restrictions.
Visit our page on the Landcare Gateway to find all upcoming news and events. Other projects in the gestation phase are :-
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