Australia reaches record number of myBMP-accredited farms

This month the Australian cotton industry achieved a new myBMP record, with a total of 77 businesses and 234 farms now myBMP accredited.
myBMP – Best Management Practices – is a voluntary program for Australian cotton growers. It is a comprehensive farm and environmental management system designed to improve all aspects of on-farm cotton production. It uses practical tools to ensure growers are using world’s best industry practice to produce economically, socially and environmentally sustainable cotton.

Kevin and Mary-Ellen Schwager grow dryland cotton at 'Melburra' in Edgeroi, NSW. They embarked upon the myBMP accreditation process because they wanted the highest standards of work health and safety for their employees and visitors to their farm.

"As modern-day farm managers, we have to be consistently looking for better ways to manage our farm and our risk," Kevin says. "The big evolution for me in the last 10 years from an OH&S perspective is the higher level of respect we need to have for our farm workers and for contractors who come onto our farm. We'd like to think we had reasonable systems set up, but when we got into the intricacies of the myBMP program, we became aware that there were a lot of shortcomings in the systems we had."

Kevin and Mary-Ellen and their team set about improving a range of areas and practices on the farm, such as storage, loading and filling operations, and safety documentation and inductions.

Kevin believes the myBMP program represents the future of Australian cotton.

"The myBMP program is one that can be readily adopted by the better educated young men and women who are coming back to the farm, and who are getting involved in Australian agriculture generally."