Recorded live at the Australian Women in Agriculture Conference (with a couple of G&Ts on board), Gillian and Katja tackle two topics listeners keep asking about: raw milk, and whether carbon credits are actually the industry-saving windfall they’re sold as.
#6 | Raw Milk Realities & Why Carbon Credits Might Be Failing Agriculture – Agsolutely Fabulous
Raw milk: what’s actually legal, and what isn’t
Let’s clear this up properly, because it gets muddled every single time it comes up: selling raw, unpasteurised cow’s milk for human consumption is illegal in Australia. Full stop. Under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, milk sold for drinking has to be pasteurised, and food safety regulators can fine sellers up to $275,000 for breaching it. If you own your own milking animal and drink the milk yourself, that’s an entirely different, and entirely legal, scenario. Milking your own goat or cow has been standard practice on farms for generations. Buying raw milk off someone at a market or on the side of the road is not the same thing, and it’s the version that will make you sick.
There is one genuine exception worth knowing about: in 2023 the NSW Food Authority approved the sale of “cold pressed raw milk” for the first time, using high-pressure processing rather than heat to kill harmful bacteria. It’s still a processed product, just not heat-pasteurised, and it’s the closest thing to true raw milk you can legally buy off a shelf. It is not the same as walking up to a farm gate and buying a jug of straight, untreated milk.
On the health claims: some people with dairy intolerance report better tolerance of raw milk, and there’s early research out of the US looking at enzymes destroyed during pasteurisation as a possible reason why. It’s a real area of interest, but it doesn’t change the legal picture or the food safety risk of buying unpasteurised milk from an unregulated seller. If you want a house cow or a milking goat, knock yourself out. If you’re tempted by someone’s laminated sign at the local market, don’t.
Carbon credits: free money, or a cost dressed up as an opportunity?
Carbon is sold to agriculture as the industry’s saving grace. The reality on the ground is messier. A carbon credit represents one tonne of emissions stored or avoided, and here’s the part that rarely makes it into the mainstream coverage: once a farmer sells that credit, it’s gone. They can no longer count it toward their own path to carbon neutrality. So every time a bank, an airline, or a mining company buys up agricultural carbon credits to call themselves “carbon neutral,” agriculture is quietly footing the emissions bill for someone else’s marketing claim, while still being blamed publicly for its own emissions.
The measurement and verification costs, soil tests, atmospheric monitoring, all of it, land on the farmer generating the credit. Meanwhile the credits themselves trade as a commodity, priced by a market that has every incentive to pay as little as possible for them. It’s a system where the party doing the actual carbon storage carries the cost and the risk, and the party buying the credit gets the reputational win.
There’s a land-use problem too. Large corporations, mining companies in particular, are buying up agricultural land specifically to lock it up and claim revegetation credits, then leaving it unmanaged. Neighbouring farmers are left to deal with the feral pigs, cats, and weeds that breed up on unmanaged blocks, funding exclusion fencing and pest control out of their own pocket for a problem created next door. The company gets its ESG tick. The community wears the pest load.
None of this means agriculture shouldn’t reduce emissions, or that carbon farming can’t be a legitimate income stream for individual producers who go in with eyes open. It means every other sector claiming carbon neutrality by buying agriculture’s credits, instead of cutting their own emissions, needs to be called out for exactly what that is. If you’re approached by a carbon aggregator promising easy money, get more than one quote, understand exactly what you’re signing away, and remember that once that credit is sold, you don’t get to count it twice.
Leave a comment