Emerging opportunities presented by the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) was the subject of a meeting at Dubbo yesterday featuring high-level state and federal government representatives.

"Under the ERF, additional carbon savings can be measured by the tonne and sold as carbon credits to the Australian government for a price," Ms Taylor Edwards said.

"This means that any businesses that modify their practice to be more green could be rewarded for this activity as a business transaction. It's a business decision as well as a financial one."

Ms Taylor Edwards said Orana RDA would promote a region-wide approach (known as the Orana Carbon Project) that would encourage smaller producers from a range of industries to combine to form a big-enough bid into the ERF.

"The government is looking for the greatest abatement for the smallest cost, so it makes sense they're not going to apply all of their administration and time on five-tonne bids," she said.

"At the moment, the bid is 2000 tonnes per annum, minimum, so individual growers or an individual small business may have a great desire to bid but the costs of getting all of that measured, and putting a project plan together, may be prohibitive and they'd never recoup the costs on the dollars per tonne received.

"So there is a role for RDA Orana to provide governance for growers who don't understand what it's about other than that there's a buck in it."

Ms Taylor Edwards said the benefits were not limited to any particular industry.

"The opportunity is equal whether you're a farmer, a transport operator, machinery hire business, manufacturer or mine," she said.

"The RDA won't apply on their behalf, there are free enterprise agents out there who will do that, it's a business for them, and we don't want to take that away. But we will provide the information and workshops and access to qualified people, the carbon baggers as such."

"(Cobar landholder and carbon farmer) Peter Yench would be the first to say in the past 12 months he's put in 40 kilometres of fencing, employed a manager, he's seen people buying quad bikes, farms and houses in the local area, so there is an economic injection that goes beyond jut the farmer getting his money."

She said it made sense for RDA Orana to seize the opportunity given many of the approved methods for carbon savings were in agriculture and transport.

"They're big in this region, plus a priority of our regional plan is diversifying and expanding agriculture as a major economic driver for the region," she said.

"From a workforce development approach, we often hear it said there are jobs in the 21st century for our young people that we don't even know exist yet. Well, guess what? In this industry, there will be people who go out and measure carbon saved and there will probably be a need for a carbon farm plan in the future.

"There is a real buzz about this. It's new and different and a bit scary, it takes a bit to get your head around it because it's not something you can touch and feel. It's intangible.

"As someone neatly put it in the meeting, we've spent the past 250 years digging up black stuff out of the ground that Mother Earth has, over 300 million years, turned into coal and fossil fuels, and made widgets with it, and it's released all this stuff into the atmosphere.

"Now we're going to spend the next 250 years getting it out of the atmosphere, make widgets and put the black stuff back into the ground."