In recent years a growing number of consumers have cited concern for the environment as one of the reasons they have decided not to eat red meat.
However, a new accreditation program is able to prove that in some farming systems meat production is actually able to improve ecological outcomes for the planet.
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Executive chair of the recently formed Australian Holistic Management Co-operative, Tony Hill, said they had established an annual accreditation program, Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV), to offer farmers a cost-effective way of measuring whether the ecological health of their farm was improving.
The Co-operative has also created brand Land to Market Australia as a way of promoting the EOV results to the wider community.
"The results can help inform management decisions, but we can now also start to communicate those results... allowing consumers to support the work being done by farmers to look after their land," Mr Hill said.
The program takes a baseline measurement of a property's ecological outcomes and then an annual assessment is conducted to determine whether ecological health outcomes have improved.
"To keep costs under control we do visual assessment of 15 elements annually, such as whether we're seeing signs of living organisms as part of the paddock ecosystem or whether there's areas of bare ground," Mr Hill said. "Every five years we do an in-depth assessment to make sure the visual indicators we're seeing... represent the reality, in terms of soil health, pasture species, etc..."
Mr Hill said the assessments were done at a number of carefully selected sites across a property by accredited monitors and verifiers, and the farm was given an overall score. If the score had risen from the previous year, the farm was eligible for Ecological Outcome Verification.
Close to three-quarters of the 40 members of the Australian Holistic Management Cooperative are now verified and Braidwood cattle producer Victoria Royds was one of the first.
Ms Royds said she had witnessed the impacts of the 1980s drought on her family farm and did not want to see anything like it again.
"It was just horrendous...it was like a desert landscape."
Since returning to the farm Ms Royds has committed to Holistic Management practices and has split her 400 hectare property from 16 paddocks into close to 80, enabling her to rotate her Angus cow herd to allow pasture to fully recover before re-grazing. The cattle are moved around the property at least every four days during the growing season.
"We're working with nature rather than against it," Ms Royds said.
"The cattle are trampling the grass down to the ground, creating a mulch/litter layer.
"They break the soil, allowing places for seed to grow and moisture to come in and sequester soil carbon.
"The soil becomes healthy, full of microbes, then the plants can take up more nutrients, the cattle ingest more nutrients and you ingest more nutrients."
The herd is run as one mob, decreasing the workload and increasing the impact, with even the calves not separated for weaning - instead Ms Royds' uses nose-rings, which stop calves from being able to suckle their mother's udder.
Another key objective of holistic farming is retaining ground cover and this meant Ms Royds started to destock early during the recent drought, to alleviate the pressure on the land and allow for faster recovery.
This year she will calve down just over 100 cows, a third of the property's carrying capacity, as she slowly continues restocking.
For the last five years Ms Royds said her focus had been improving her farm's infrastructure for time management, rotational grazing, setting up fences as well as establishing water points.
Her next focus is selling her produce more directly - closing the gap between herself as a producer and the end-consumer in order to better promote her EOV accreditation.
But, for now she is able to display her EOV certification on her pen sign when selling in the saleyards - alerting buyers that there is something special about these cattle and the land they came from.
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