Matt Canavan speaking in Senate Estimates.

NATIONALS senator Matt Canavan has taken the Federal Agriculture Department to task about a lack of detail on how much land will be taken out production to meet Australia’s net zero by 2050 target.

In a tense Senate Estimates hearing today, Mr Canavan expressed his frustration at the agriculture department’s lack of curiosity in how the target will impact its industry – with no answers on how much land will be taken out of agricultural production for both reforestation and renewable energy projects.

The Department last month released its Ag and Land Sector Plan, which was drawn up to detail what the country’s net zero target will mean for the agricultural industry.

Carbon sequestration on agricultural land most is set to be the main contributor to the “net” part of the target, with “reforestation” taking up the overwhelming majority of that sequestration.

Reforestation is defined as converting land that was once forest, back to being a forest – with that mostly expected to happen on the more intensively farmed parts of Southern Australia.

With Department bosses fronting a Senate Estimates hearing today, Senator Canavan expressed his frustration that the agricultural department could not detail how much land would be “reforested”.

“It seems to me that you are just trying to hide the detail from Australian farmers,” Senator Canavan told acting secretary Justine Saunders – who said that was not the case.

“You are happy to market the benefits, or the perceived benefits, of reforestation in terms of a carbon sink. But you are not willing to tell the Australian agricultural sector what the cost of getting that is, which is a reduced amount of agricultural land.

“This why people are cynical about these targets because you are not being up front with them about it.”

Rough calculations suggest 5m ha

Referring to modelling from the Federal Treasury department about how much sequestration was needed from reforestation and how much carbon can be sequestered/ha, Mr Canavan said it was likely to take up about 5m ha of land.

“I am not going to object your arithmetic Senator, but there is considerable uncertainty about the amount of carbon sequestration that can be delivered,” said department deputy secretary Matt Lowe.

“(The Treasury modelling) was a literature review and there is more week that needs to be done on carbon sequestration potential.”

Mr Canavan labelled the Treasury modelling some of the worst economic modelling he had ever seen. He cited two other reports that put figures on the amount of land needed for reforestation.

One of them was the Net Zero Australia report, which was put together by University of Melbourne, University of Queensland and Princeton University.

“They have a map of Australia and on the top it says, ‘our modelling cites 5.1m ha of new trees on crop land and pastureland’. Then they understate it by saying ‘this will be very difficult’,” he said.

Mr Canavan then went on to cite some CSIRO modelling, which said the reforestation needed to happen in areas of land that has already been cleared.

“We are talking about 5m ha that covers the Murray Darling Basin, the food bowl of the Lockyer Valley, the Riverland, the wheat producing areas of Western Australia  ”

“It just beggars’ belief to me that we would be seeking to destroy our food security in such a way and there is almost no curiosity from the agriculture department about this.”

Department looking at options complimentary to agriculture

Both Mr Lowe and ABARES executive director Jared Greenville said the ag department was looking at sequestration options that were complimentary to agriculture.

“We certainly acknowledge that reforestation or revegetation is an efficient form of carbon removal,” Mr Lowe said. But we also acknowledge that there is other forms of carbon removal that is available, soil carbon as an example.

“There arealso opportunities that exist for reforestation to occur in sympathy with farming.”

• Beef Central will keep an eye on Senate Estimates tonight