The Australian cotton industry is leading efforts to redefine workplace sustainability, ensuring social indicators move from being a “nice to have” to a “must have.” While the commercial value of measuring social and human capital hasn’t always been obvious, a new framework is highlighting their importance to farm businesses and the broader agricultural sector.

Drawing on previous industry research and applying new principles from our revamped sustainability data framework, we now have a much clearer view of what really matters in farm workplaces and how it can be measured: we’re putting the “so what” into agriculture social sustainability.

This process gives us a logical set of indicators to measure what farm workplaces depend on, so we can seek cross-sector agreement on consistent terms and indicators.

Using recent research, we have identified three logical workplace objectives farmers depend on:

1. Retain farmers and core employees
2. Attract casual and contract labour when needed
3. Keep everyone safe and appropriately skilled.

It may seem obvious, but clearly defining these objectives is essential. Outlining the three dependencies for a sustainable farm workplace helps researchers and experts pinpoint the key factors influencing them. The things that attract workers, retain core staff, or ensure safety aren’t always what might be expected.

A streamlined approach to data collection

Collaborating with experts and other agricultural industries to identify measurable indicators for these impacts and dependencies lays the groundwork for coordinated data collection. We've identified potential data sources for each indicator and how often they should be measured. While some data is available, other areas will need cost-effective collection methods.

By focusing on what matters most in farm workplaces and gaining support for these indicators across agriculture, we aim to align sector-wide data collection efforts, work with government agencies, and ensure all sectors measure the same factors efficiently. This approach helps reduce costs and minimises survey fatigue for farmers.

Our work to date suggests agriculture sustainability workplace data collection could be a mix of:

• Annual data, mainly free, and largely from industry documents, regulators or other existing sources of data
• New coordinated cross-sector investment in common data collection every three years
• Existing, free, Census data every five years.

This suggests the major, or only investment made by agriculture industries would be every three years. It also suggests most of this data could be collected by a single cross-sector survey which would significantly reduce farmer survey fatigue.

What’s next?

We’re sharing this work with the Australian Agriculture Sustainability Framework and other industry sustainability frameworks and hoping to work towards a harmonised approach to indicators and data collection as soon as possible.