Measuring up: leveraging consumer demand to drive agricultural sustainability

Agriculture is at the heart of Australia's identity, economy, and future. With farmers caring for over half the country’s land and producing 90% of the food we eat, agriculture underpins our food security, sustains rural livelihoods, and helps feed a growing world.

Despite the ongoing work by farmers to innovate their practices to produce high quality food more sustainably, the environmental impacts of agriculture are hard to ignore. Agricultural activities are currently a leading cause of native animal habitat and biodiversity decline, accounting for 17.9% of Australia’s net greenhouse gas emissions per the latest national inventory, and 74% of national water consumption.
Today, farmers are on the front line of changing weather patterns and increasingly extreme conditions. As a result, they are increasingly shouldering the responsibility of adapting their practices to ensure the resilience of our nation’s agricultural sector for generations to come.

However, current incentive structures designed to support this work are too sparse and convoluted to be effective. If we’re serious about securing the future of Australian agriculture, we need to do more than applaud farmers for their efforts—we need to back them with systems that drive real change.

That’s why this paper proposes a bold but practical idea: a simple, consumer-facing agricultural sustainability star rating system, clearly displayed on product packaging. The goal? To shift the balance of incentives so that doing the right thing for the environment also becomes the smart business choice. By giving consumers a simple way to recognise and reward sustainable farming, we can help tip the scales in favour of practices that protect the land, water, and ecosystems we all depend on.

To work, this approach must reflect a few key features. It needs to be independently credible and in line with consumer protection laws, ensuring trust from consumers and industry alike. It must be practical and not place an excessive burden on farmers, who are already doing more than their fair share. And it should be designed to evolve over time, with the flexibility to adapt as farmers continue to innovate and improve practices on the ground.

Above all, we need to move forward with urgency and purpose, without letting perfect be the enemy of good. The priority is to get started, refine through experience, and build momentum toward a more sustainable agricultural future. The catalyst for this will be clear government support from the outset, ideally through the establishment of an independent statutory body which ensures the rating framework keeps at pace with scientific advances at a pace acceptable to industry.

This proposal to implement a star rating system for agricultural sustainability builds on recommendations in our earlier report, Cultivating Resilience. These include standardising data metrics for measuring key environmental indicators, to build an informative and broadly applicable methodology for measuring agricultural sustainability, as well as supplementing investment into agricultural research and development and the expansion of information sharing networks between farmers, to ensure they are equipped with the knowledge of practices that improve both the health and productivity of their land.

Ultimately, this is about much more than a star on a package. It’s about backing the people who feed the nation and ensuring that Australian agriculture remains productive, resilient, and sustainable for generations to come. Implementing a clear, change-driving mechanism like the star rating system is a crucial step toward reducing Australia’s broader environmental footprint, while giving farmers the recognition, support, and market power they need to keep putting food on our tables well into the future.