Christophe and Sylvie Bur, ‘Zeebra Plains’ Maryborough QLD

Five years ago, Christophe and Sylvie Bur started out on their sustainability journey and so began their investigations to become carbon neutral farmers, choosing the pathway set by the Emissions Reduction Fund, to pursue the potential business and income stream options available to them.
The Burs are first generation cattle producers in Australia, coming into the livestock industry from a totally different world as an engineer and management consultant in Paris. They are the first to admit that their operation Zeebra Plains is small scale, comprising of 100 head of breeders on a 750 hectare property outside Maryborough in the Mary Burnett region. So their priority was as much about ensuring their financial security as it was about building sustainability in perpetuity for their business.
As Christophe explains, they went in hard, starting with the development of a carbon account for their farm, investigating the various carbon abatement practice change methods they could build into their business, investigating the available greenhouse gas methodologies and accounting tools, before deciding on which methods made the most financial and sustainable sense to their circumstances.