Nap Nap Station Landscape Project

Nap Nap Station Landscape Project is a soil carbon sequestration project located at Nap Nap Station, approximately 15km west of Maude and 70km west of Hay in the Riverina region of New South Wales. It was registered in October 2021 and covers an extensive 30,094.23 hectares.

Soil carbon sequestration projects involve building soil organic carbon through new or materially changed agricultural management practices. Under the 2021 methodology, projects must use a combination of direct soil sampling and modelling to estimate the carbon sequestered over the project's lifetime.

The Lower Bidgee floodplain region around Hay and Maude is widely known for merino sheep breeding, cattle grazing, and irrigated winter cereal cropping. The area is a semi-arid environment characterized by low average rainfall, and the local soils frequently present as sodic or magnesic.

This project increases carbon in the agricultural soil system by undertaking new irrigation. Additional activities designed to build soil carbon include altering the stocking rate and duration of grazing to promote vegetation cover, applying gypsum and synthetic or non-synthetic fertilisers to remediate sodic soils and address nutrient deficiencies, and establishing permanent pasture where there was previously fallow or cropland. In February 2026, the project updated its methodology from the older 2018 measurement-only method to the 2021 measurement and models method.

As an interesting historical and cultural note, Nap Nap Station sits on Nari Nari Country and contains a highly significant 10,000-year-old Aboriginal burial site situated on a sand hill, making it one of the largest inland burial sites in NSW. Furthermore, the station recently completed a $2.4 million critical water infrastructure upgrade in mid-2024 to modernize water delivery systems, improve drought resilience, and return water to the environment.