Australian Natural Resources Atlas: Agriculture - Overview report: Benchmarking Environmental Challenges and Agricultural Practice
Overview report: Benchmarking Environmental Challenges and Agricultural Practice
Sinclair Knight Merz, June 2000
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This project is part of the Audit's Theme 5: Productivity and Sustainability. Projects associated with this theme link resource condition, land management and productivity. The aim of this theme is to "demonstrate the importance of land management and the capacity for best management practice to ameliorate adverse effects".
This Benchmarking project investigates current recommended natural resource management (NRM) practices adopted by rural industries, the current level of adoption of recommended and other NRM practices by industries at a regional level and factors that are constraining the level of adoption of recommended management practices. In addition to this industry focus, this investigation considers industries position within landscapes. It links, where relevant, environmental challenges, management practices and information requirements that are needed to support sustainable land and water resource use across industries.
The method adopted for this project involved accessing existing data relating to land management practices from ABARE, rural industries and various government agencies. This data was analysed in terms of identification of industry practice, adoption of practices in a regional context, factors affecting rural industry's capacity to implement change in management practice and the spatial presentation of data outputs where possible.
This project has a national focus and assesses national and industry statistics on a regional scale where possible. All States and Territories are included in the analysis and all the major rural industries have been investigated. The industries assessed were the dairy sugar, cotton, grains (including rice), beef cattle, sheep and horticultural industries. The area of investigation for all the industries, except the livestock industries, was limited to the areas containing intensive agriculture. The livestock industries included the intensive agriculture areas and the remaining rangelands areas located in the central areas of Australia.
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