The vegetable industry is the first of many fresh produce groups beginning to measure its environmental impact.

According HAL's Natural Resources and Climate manager, Alison Turnbull, there is increasing pressure for industry to be aware of the impacts from the production of its fresh produce.

"Horticulture is now considering its impact on carbon emissions and the actions and research that need to take place to deal with it," she says.

"These very exciting industry developments will have positive business outcomes for our local growers and all Australians."

Horticulture is an $8 billion dollar industry including fruit, vegetables, nuts, nursery, extractive crops, cut flowers and turf.

It only accounts for an estimated 1pc of agricultural emissions. Agricultural emissions constitute 16pc of emissions across all industries.

According to Alison Turnbull, the industry's focus on measuring carbon footprints is a business and sustainability issue for the industry.

"Managing the impact of water availability, the increased incidence of pests, diseases and weeds and the threat of rising input costs as such energy, fertiliser and transport will be crucial to Australian growers to stay in business in the long term," she says.

"The rapid mainstreaming of the term known as 'carbon footprinting' has been driven by such activities as those undertaken by Tesco and other international retailers as a means to differentiate products by their environmental impacts."

UK supermarket chain Tesco has developed product-specific carbon footprints. This means products are labelled with their carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). This way, Tesco is able to benchmark its own labelled products against competitor labels.

"Domestically, there has not been such a strong and driven interest in labelling the footprint of products. But that does not mean that industry will not eventually need to account for and understand the impacts of its production on emissions and/or the environment," Ms Turnbull says.