Soil report

 

‘Analysis of the Issues and Opportunities in Soil Extension and Adoption for Victorian Farmers’

 

Précis and Technical Report

 

By Dr Peter Fisher, Victorian Regional Soil Coordinator (RSC*), Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption & Innovation Hub

 

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This report is an analysis of the soil knowledge and extension issues and opportunities for Victorian farmers. Identification of these issues and opportunities has been through reviewing literature, engagement with stakeholders, selected results from the RSC run national farmer and ag-industry survey, and by original analysis and theory development.

It is the premise of this report that continual improvement in extension practices is required if future investment in soil research and development (R&D) is to become more effective.

There are many concerns facing soil R&D, including reduced funding, less focus on teaching fundamental science at universities, and a move away from soils R&D by state agencies, however, these concerns are beyond the scope of this report. It is assumed that land managers, for both agricultural and NRM benefits, desire information, knowledge, and support, to improve their soil management practices.  This report focuses on how to provide these needs in the most effective way to increase the rate of practice adoption.

The report is primarily intended for those in federal and state governments who provide policy direction on how extension programs should be designed and implemented, but also for farming system groups, peak industry organisations, and state agencies that employ the extension staff and manage their activities, and finally the report is for academics and knowledge brokers interested in the concepts that define the effectiveness of extension practices in creating adoption.

The report provides an overview of the issues involved in the adoption of soil management practices that improve both the productivity and sustainability of our natural resource base, and it lays down the foundations for further work to explore these issues through developments in soil science and extension theory.

(* RSC’s are an initiative of the Australian Government through funding from the Climate-Smart Agriculture Program under the Natural Heritage Trust.)

 

Sections

 

The report is divided into four sections:

 

Section One: critical review of adoption barriers and drivers

 

This section provides a critical review of the barriers and drivers for adoption of soil management practices and observes that the priority soil issues have not changed significantly over the past couple of decades. Evidence suggests there is generally good extension engagement with farmers but that this does not necessarily lead to increased adoption. The Section concludes that improved extension effectiveness requires a more sophisticated understanding of adoption drivers, particularly an understanding of farmers’ psychological perspectives that drive practice change.

 

Section Two: soil-management practices framework 

 

The next section proposes a framework that divides soil management practices into categories, defined by their rationality-context, as either evidence-based, stochastically predictable, or theoretically supported, and suggests that practice adoption will be increase if extension methods were more specifically designed to account for the unique psychological requirements for each category.

 

Section Three: priority funding & activities

 

This section makes recommendations for priority activities/funding, in each of the 3 rationality-context categories, that if implemented would increase the effectiveness of extension methods and result in accelerated adoption of soil management practices for each category. The section makes 10 recommendations, each recommendation has a different expected size of impact and cost of implementation, which needs to be considered when prioritising the list. However, 2 priorities are singled out for particular consideration. The first priority is judged to potentially have the greatest impact on achieving a paradigm change to narrow the gap between science and practice, i.e. between knowledge and implementation. However, this priority arguably has the largest investment cost of the 10 proposed priorities and would therefore require significant federal funding. The second priority, in contrast, has probably one of the lowest investment costs but still a significant likely national impact on confidence in adopting extension messaging. It does, however, require important national coordination and there is an important role for federal government.

 

Section Four: workforce

 

The final section considers issues related to the availability of a sufficient workforce to deliver extension services as a consequence of significant decreases in government funding for agricultural extension and advisory services over the last decade. Results from the Victorian data of the national RSC coordinated farmer and ag-industry survey are used to consider whether the private sector extension services are effectively filling the shortfall in state agency extension services. Section Four also discusses results from the survey on the perceived severity in production loss due to specific soil constraints and considers the apparent information gaps for key management practices.

The issues considered in the report, and the recommendations made, are considered applicable to the State of Victoria but are likely to be relevant to other states and territories, however, specific extension demands will vary across the country and priority recommendations may vary in other regions.