Challa Station pastoralist Debbie Dowden among finalists for WA Rural Woman of the Year award

Challa Station pastoralist Debbie Dowden is in the running to be crowned WA Rural Woman of the Year for her efforts to “revolutionise” the sustainability of the pastoral industry.

Ms Dowden, who owns and operates the 200,000ha cattle station in the Southern Rangelands with husband Ashley, was one of three finalists revealed this week.

The other finalists are Vasse Valley Hemp Farm co-owner and operator Bronwyn Blake, and Denmark farmer, sports therapist and Farm Life Fitness founder Louise O’Neill.

The winner, who will be announced at a ceremony on May 5, will go in the running to be crowned national winner of the AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award.

Ms Dowden was nominated for her ongoing work to develop a natural capital accounting system — an emerging methodology used to measure and improve agricultural sustainability, and put a monetary value on natural resources — at Challa Station.

NCA originated in the UK and is being trialled by Ms Dowden as part of the WA Department of Agriculture and Food’s $550,000 Southern Rangelands Revitalisation Pilot program.

Still in its infancy, NCA has until now only been used in more productive farming country and high rainfall areas.

It is hoped Ms Dowden’s groundbreaking work will lead to the pastoral industry becoming more economically and environmentally sustainable.

“We will use historical data, rangelands science and remote sensing to help experts develop an appropriate methodology to capture the benefits of natural capital performance and express it in meaningful financial terms,” she said.

“By monitoring with measurements from NCA, we can determine how best to manage our livestock under a holistic regime using agtech to measure performance and inform management decisions.”

By implementing NCA, Ms Dowden said pastoral enterprises could prove their environmental sustainability to markets, banks and consumers, and help meet community expectations the world over.

“It opens the possibility of receiving a premium for our red meat, and for monetisation of the improvements we make to the landscape,” she said.

“I hope that we can develop a model and methodology that can be duplicated by pastoralists across the nation and even around the globe.

“I know we can meet criteria and targets without having to make huge changes to our production systems, and I know agtech innovation will make it feasible for properties like ours, with a modest financial turnover, to take a leading role in natural capital accounting.”

Working with Ms Dowden to develop the technology solutions needed for the project are agtech companies AxisTech and CustodianAg.

With their help, she is using an emerging framework called the Global Farm Metric which was developed in the UK and has proved successful overseas.

The GFM helps farmers make sustainable decisions and assists governments in setting and monitoring progress towards international sustainability targets for agriculture.

By sectioning the farm into several categories of sustainability, of which a score is produced for each category, the GFM provides a common approach to measuring a farm’s impact — both positive and negative — on the environment, economy and society.

The sustainability score identifies which areas are doing well and where improvements can be made, enabling farmers to make data-informed decisions to improve their land and business.

AxisTech managing director Wes Lawrence said the company would use its interconnected data platform AxisStream to apply the GFM to Ms Dowden’s project.

“We will do the data engineering and data science to facilitate this connection and to use the GFM but be able to adapt it and apply it into a modern Australian digital agricultural context,” he said.

“Collaborating with CustodianAg and using the GFM will not only build a data-driven model for Debbie’s NCA project, but will also automate processes for her, deliver metrics generated by real production data, and it’ll be seamlessly integrated into her broader pastoral operation.”

CustodianAg director George Kailis said he was “delighted” to be working with someone as “innovative and passionate” as Ms Dowden.

“We are excited about the partnership with Debbie and Challa Station, and the evolution of this nationally and globally significant project,” he said.