Strategic alliance announced to improve agricultural production on marginal farming land

Posted 18 May 2021

Midway Tasmania and Climate Friendly, two leading service providers in their respective fields of forestry and carbon project development, have announced a strategic alliance that combines farm forestry with carbon farming.

The partnership model will provide services to local land managers in Tasmania, enabling them to become small scale private forestry growers and to improve the productivity of otherwise marginal land.

Climate Friendly and Midway will partner with these growers to facilitate both an early income from carbon farming, in addition to longer term income from sustainable forest products.

The alliance offers an integrated service model that aims to replace short-rotation woodchip plantations with long-rotation plantations, grown for saw logs which can be used to manufacture sawn-timber products such as structural timber, furniture and engineered timber products.

As well as the carbon sequestration from the atmosphere, carbon farming practices will help improve soil and water quality, mitigate salinity and enhance biodiversity.

There are potentially two sources of income for the grower with this carbon farming and forestry model.

The first source is the revenue from the forest products which they receive through thinning and final clear fell harvest around 25-30 years of the plantation.

The second income is from the value of the carbon drawn from the atmosphere into the trees as they grow (Australian Carbon Credit Units or ACCUs, issued by the Clean Energy Regulator).

The grower can register their own carbon farming project on larger properties, or for smaller plantings they can participate by joining an aggregated project with other small scale growers.

The local growers are supported to plant and manage the forestry operations by Midway Tasmania, helping ensure the plantation is highly productive and also meets the carbon project permanence obligations, such as protection from disturbances and management of tree health. Carbon farming project expertise is provided by Climate Friendly, including a range of specialist services from project administration, legal and regulatory compliance monitoring, mapping, abatement modelling, project reporting, audit management and trading of ACCUs.

Midway’s Managing Director, Tony Price said “The company was very pleased to be able to join forces with Climate Friendly in providing private forest owners with the opportunity to generate carbon offsets and expand or maintain their plantation estate to provide long term financial and environmental benefits to Tasmania”.

Climate Friendly’s Chief Operating Officer, Nigel Miller, adds “This alliance with Midway Tasmania is a win for the Tasmanian forest industry, small scale private forest growers and the environment.”