Understanding farmers will help them adopt new technology and develop precision agriculture attitudes, Kellog scholar Oliver Knowles says.
During his study Knowles realised there was more to be uncovered about the make-up of Kiwi farmers.
Early on in his research he quickly came to recognise the conflict farmers almost subconsciously had to deal with when adopting new ideas.
The conundrum of seeking short-term, in some cases immediate, business gains conflicted with the far longer-term biological nature of pastoral farming.
Those short-term decisions and investments might play out positively for the immediate business cycle but the longer-term implications were unknown.
“The difficulty lies in the ability to see the longer-term outcomes onfarm,” Knowles said.
“Take genetic advances in stock, for example. Iit will be a number of years before you see measurable impacts onfarm.”
He found part of the extension challenge was caused by a lack of data, understanding or research about farmers’ education and skills.
While most in the industry took it as a given farmers were getting older, little beyond that was really understood about their demographic profile.
“That makes it quite difficult to understand both strategy and directional development of new technology and its release to those farmers.”
Knowles said it was easy to run a workshop with farmers and simply ask them what their background was but the industry needed far broader understanding for more targeted release of new technology.
He found that while the tech sector was proficient at laying out the features of a piece of hardware, the benefits were often not as clear, sometimes resulting in disappointment at the users’ end when the product didn’t deliver anything better than before.
“So, they are left wondering ‘who are we to believe?’
“It appears there is a need there for more independent extension specialists in the industry to verify the value of the innovations that farmers are presented with.”
That was partly a result of a reduction in government investment in regional research initiatives.
While praising the levy-funded organisations, Knowles said farmers were still wary of the organisations’ potential political influences.
He suggested the New Zealand Animal Evaluation model to assess dairy stock genetics was a good example that could be followed for emerging farm innovations.
Better, centralised recording of adopted innovations and uptake would also help the next generation of researchers, stopping them trying to recreate a sometimes imperfect wheel.
“I’ve seen the value of these sorts of learnings at Ballance with our PGP partnership with Government where a number of innovations never make it past the hypothesis stage.
“But we’ve learnt a huge amount about what works and what doesn’t through the research process.”
Knowles believed an innovation umbrella could accelerate the adoption of technology and new science to evolve agriculture and farming practice.
“NZ farmers have taken a bit longer to pick up on technology like GPS used in precision ag but that’s not always a bad thing.
“We tend to put our own flavour on this technology when it arrives, given so much of it comes out of broadacre arable, viticultural or horticultural monocultures and into a pastoral system here.”
While it was a much-quoted example, he pointed to drones being trialled here by United States companies on the grounds NZ had such an open approach to adjusting to and adopting imported technology and civil aviation rules that facilitated those trial adoptions.
That can-do environment could be enhanced and farmer uptake accelerated if the traditional hypothesis-concept-trial-release to market model was run parallel to a suck-it-and-see approach.
“Identifying the target farmer markets by having better information on farmer profiles means you could involve the potential adopters earlier in the development of the innovation.
“This would improve both the adoption rate and success of the innovation.”
It might even be as simple as putting a prototype in front of a group and asking them if they had it, how they would use it.
Knowles said his experience on Kellogg proved invaluable for building his self-confidence by having to present, debate and apply critical thinking.
He was surprised at a key piece of advice that repeatedly came from some of the high-performing individuals he met.
“That was to ensure you took your loved ones with you on whatever journey you were on, otherwise you simply won’t realise your full potential if you are not happy at home and neither are they.”
