Farm-level environmental sustainability in Australia's beef industry: systemic and practical challenges in data collection and reporting

There is an increasing need for accurate and readily available farm level data as environmental sustainability reporting becomes an embedded part of livestock supply chain activities. In this study, we aimed to understand the Australian beef industry’s contemporary approaches to measuring farm level sustainability and the challenges encountered with collecting and using farm level data. In-depth interviews with industry professionals and academic experts revealed systemic and practical challenges limiting the collection and usefulness of farm level data for supply chain sustainability reporting. These challenges were grouped into four main themes: data collection and quality; data coverage, comprehensibility and language; and governance challenges. We found systemic issues stemmed from governance challenges, namely barriers to investment in data collection initiatives upheld by industry competitiveness and a perception of a data free-riding phenomenon. Politicisation of the sustainability of beef production, and the lack of standards around how to measure environmental sustainability attributes has the potential to cause severe adverse outcomes for the industry’s sustainability measuring and reporting activities, although some industry players currently benefit from the lack of standards through product differentiation. To address practical challenges of data coverage and quality, we refer to the growing movement of using research infrastructure networks to collect high quality datasets of environmental attributes, including Australia’s Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Network. Our findings highlight the need for more structured sustainability standards and governance, to build clarity for the industry and ensure meaningful sustainability reporting is achieved.