Outlining her company's approach to environmental management at the Charters Towers Meat Profit Day will be NAPCo's property and environmental planner, Delphine Puxty (pictured).

NAPCo runs a beef herd of about 180,000 cattle on 14 grazing properties stretching from Central Queensland into northwest Queensland and the Northern Territory, plus a large commercial feedlot on the Darling Downs.

"Most of our cattle are run in Australia's arid rangelands where climate and land type hugely dictate what can be produced and when we can produce it," Ms Puxty said.

"Our approach has always been conservative, in order to ensure resources are not depleted in one or two seasons, or even over a decade.

"But also we're conscious that most of the natural resources we use are tied to pastoral leases and in some cases, private leases, and therefore we have a legal obligation as well as a long-term interest in ensuring that we manage our land responsibly," she said.

While such Leasehold legislation has not been widely tested, there was certainly no reason why it could not be, if properties were not appropriately managed.

Ms Puxty said like most beef producers, sustainable management for NAPCo was about balancing limited resources such as water, soil fertility and biodiversity with more abundant resources like solar/wind power and land area.

This had to be done in the most efficient way - financially, environmentally and in a human resources sense - to produce a quality product.

"In our case, that means any 'environmental' projects have to show a financial benefit and fit into a broader, longer-term plan for each property, or the company as a whole," she said.

Specific return on investment for each project was often difficult to quantify, however, because of concurrent innovations in other areas such as herd management or genetics. However payback tended to be longer term, rather than shorter.