There were many key drivers for horticulture to begin on a pathway towards improved environmental management at a national scale.

In summary the key motivations for horticulture to invest in environmental assurance pathway are:

• To ensure a simple, cost-effective, user-friendly mechanism to raise awareness, and facilitate adoption of good agricultural practice through environmental assurance across horticulture;
• To ensure environmental assurance / environmental management systems are, where ever possible, integrated into existing farm management systems thus reducing cost of management and compliance;
• To ensure that as an industry, horticulture is best able to contribute to Natural Resource Management (NRM) and to provide evidence of that sustainable NRM;
• To ensure that as an industry, horticulture is best able to address community concerns as they arise;
• To assist in achieving improved production efficiencies;
• To improve the resilience of the horticultural sector; and
• To assist industry with competitiveness, ensuring environmental assurance is structured in such a way as to best meet the demands of domestic and export markets.

While there is no clear market benefit for the adoption and promotion of environmentally friendly fresh produce, there are still a number of benefits that could be returned to growers for the implementation of the environmental practices set out in the EA Guidelines.

Some examples are:

• Better understanding of the environment and its links to the farm business
• Improved business and risk management skills
• Improved communication in the enterprise team/farm family
• Better record keeping and monitoring
• Improved business planning
• Market advantage (?)
• Safeguarding future market access
• Securing future resource access
• Potential savings through more efficient use of resources
• Improved management of environmental assets
• Sustainability
• Greater security for future generations
• Ability to demonstrate environmental stewardship

Overall this will allow industry to prove the ‘green’ in the notion of “clean and green”. The notion of ‘clean and green’ has been used to market Australian horticultural produce for years. Industry and Government have put considerable effort into developing and implementing food safety programs that clearly justify the ‘clean’ label. An environmental assurance approach will help demonstrate this and prove the industries environmental credentials.

There has been activity within the environmental area in horticulture industry and this has been increasing. Horticulture should be proud of its achievements to date and should be working towards demonstration of this effort.

There is a clear opportunity (and also a challenge) to demonstrate horticulture’s “clean and green” image to the wider community. This will need to be tackled at the national, across-industry scale, but also in localised areas as well. For example, community concern about agricultures impact on the Great Barrier Reef is an issue for Queensland coastal horticultural areas and needs to be addressed strategically. By implementing a scheme such as the EA Guidelines industry will be able to demonstrate the environmental credentials.

This will require increased collaboration/cohesion in industry to ensure a consistent message is delivered.