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I actually started out in landcare 25 years ago
when I was preparing for this.
And you don't often reflect back and count the years
that you've been on this earth and at what point
you might have done certain significant things.
But 25 years ago, I actually formed a school landcare group.
I was in high school at the time in the Aubrey region.
And we went out and did revegetation
to halt gully erosion.
And it was a mechanism to engage with my peers in the school,
and also to engage with natural resource management, which
I was very passionate about and continue to be.
17 years ago, I moved across to western Australia
and became a landcare coordinator
in the Shire of Victoria Plains in the town of Calingiri,
which is 130 people including the dogs.
And the task there was to grow engagement
in landcare, onground impacts, partnerships.
And to do anything, whatever tickled an individual's fancy,
I could catch that up into landcare and engage people.
Just under 13 years ago I started
with the Birchip Cropping Group, moved to Victoria,
which you've just heard about from Caroline.
And I did that to broaden my understanding of landcare
from a production focus.
I'd had a very strong environmental focus
in a traditional role as a landcare coordinator in WA.
And I grew in my decade there, as did BCG, broadening out
to have a range of environmental and social initiatives.
These days I engage with landcare locally in the Bendigo
area where I purport to spend my time, part of my time.
And I work at a regional level, state level,
engage nationally through the Australia Landcare Council.
And I'm involved in partnerships with local land managers,
cultural custodians, regional authorities, government,
corporates, and philanthropics.
And it seems that navigating landcare now
is much more complex than when I first
moved to WA as a landcare coordinator.
Today I'm actually going to ask you to think about landcare
in the context of the Darwinian theory, survival
of the fittest.
Now, I am a firm and passionate believer
and advocate for landcare.
But I'm also a realist.
And I can be exceptionally critical,
constructively critical.
And I recognise that we can't rest on our laurels.
So what is fittest?
By fittest I mean fit for purpose.
For a marathon, not a sprint.
Fitness of a movement, of a landcare group or a farmer
group to survive the future.
Now we know that there's plenty of communities
that have not survived.
And you drive around rural and regional Australia,
there's always a historical marker of something
that had been there in prior years.
And there are many groups that are weary and battle-scarred.
But Darwin also recognised that barring a cataclysmic event,
and I think in one of the concurrent sessions
they're talking about those, there will be survivors
and thrivers.
Strong, fit, adaptive, and transformative will survive.
Landcare has been fit enough to survive 25 years.
It has achieved enormous impact, has been an unsung hero,
initiated widespread movement, connected city and rural,
changed landscapes, influenced practise,
and has been exported around the world to 20 countries.
Perhaps, however, it's also been a victim of its own success.
I'd like to reflect on past experiences
and challenge you to address the fitness of your group
and gauge your business with landcare,
and consider how you can help support
independence for this movement.
I'm going to talk about landcare as Gen Y. Landcare that
has high brand awareness, exceptional awareness
for these hands.
But do you understand what they do?
The multiple benefits of landcare.
Do we actually articulate and measure and advocate for those?
And a need for social capacity and social capital
to successfully navigate complexity.
I'm going to talk about this in the national context
and in the rural and regional context.
So I am, because of time, not touching
on the phenomenal work is done internationally
and the high amount of work that happens in urban communities.
So let's think about landcare in generational terms.
Gen Y. What is a typical Gen Y?
Commonly assumed to have an emphasis on extrinsic values,
such as money, fame, and image, and less emphasis
on intrinsic value such as self-acceptance,
group affiliation, and community.
But they are confident, open-minded, tech-savvy,
ambitious, and they like to be liked, especially on Facebook.
Some believe many Gen Y's have been rewarded
for minimal accomplishments, such as mere participation,
for example.
And they have unrealistic expectations of working life.
Anyone in a Gen X or baby-boomers
here will be nodding at the challenges.
Anyone in a Gen Y will say, yeah, but we're good.
We don't need to worry.
Your average 25-year-old these days still lives at home.
Well, mine do.
They hanker for the benefits of adulthood
but are not keen to take on full responsibility.
They delay some of the typical adulthood rites of passage,
like marriage or starting a career.
But then, the socioeconomic landscape
makes it financially challenging to meet expectations and move
out of home.
I ask, is the group thing less sexy now,
given that we have online relationships and generally
ignore our neighbour?
And we all seem to have a consultant or a life coach.
Have we started applauding just because there
are 6,000 landcare groups and over 150 farmer groups
across the country without worrying
about the impact they may or may not have?
Have we rewarded landcare for not taking risks
to move out of home by drip-feeding it with government
support, but tie them up in layers of bureaucracy
and paperwork so that there's no time
to explore other supporters.
It's not just a task to Gen Y to explore and create
opportunities.
It's also the responsibility for the parents,
National Farmers' Federation, Australian Conservation
Foundation, and government, to initiate the challenging
conversations and support succession.
Every farmer knows the challenges of succession
planning, but we all recognise how critical it is to get it
right.
What does a 25-year-old do to consolidate that great start
that its parents have provided?
The first quarter century, and to fly rather than
to peter out and fade away?
In the latest edition of Landcare in Focus,
the national landcare facilitator Brett de Hayr
is quoted as saying, "Landcare is now a movement made up
of hundreds of thousands of people across the country
from the city to the bush, old and young.
As a movement of many organisations, governments,
and individuals, it is controlled by nobody and owned
by all."
A question to reflect on.
Is landcare at risk of reinventing
tragedy of the commons?
Where each of us thinks the other is taking care of it
and giving it priority?
I was speaking with agribusiness rep recently,
he happens to be here at the conference, as well,
about landcare.
"A great brand," he said.
"We should all be involved.
But I actually struggle to understand what landcare does
and how my business can engage."
This philosophy, movement, and practise has exceptional brand
awareness.
We know these hands.
But does it have a depth of understanding and can
it have that depth of understanding
in the modern, complex world?
76% of surveyed land managers in 2012
said landcare needed to evolve, a clear message
about the desire for future innovation.
Now we all crave simplicity on the far side of complexity.
But can we simplify or reduce landcare that much?
Reality of the rural communities is complex and uncertain.
The vagaries of the weather, seasons and climate
of which we've had our fair share in recent times,
the myths and maze of marketing, the intricacies
of intelligent input, purchases and decisions,
attracting and retaining services,
volunteering for everything, keeping gardens alive,
and staying connected.
The reality for many of us in rural and regional communities
is having a plethora of information and advisors,
banks, accountants, succession planners, agronomists,
communication and community development staff,
business consultants, let alone husbands, wives, neighbours,
media, and your gut instinct and past experience.
We are overwhelmed with information,
all to be consumed now, adopted now, the value of the research
assist now, and moving on to something else now.
We will seek to simplify things.
We create sieves to ensure the crap stays out and the rigour
stays in.
For farmers, though, sieves are increasingly
the consultant and the local discussion groups,
landcare groups, or farmer systems groups.
As Caroline said, farmer attention
is scarce, seeking information relevant to the current context
and close to home, looking for the relative advantage of one
decision over another, ultimately
seeking profitability and sustainability
across the entire business, and not just decisions
related to growing or raising the product alone.
New information and practises need
to be locally validated and tested, demonstrate it works,
make sure it ticks off the quadruple bottom line--
environmental, economic, social, and political.
Farmers do not adopt without good evidence and support.
I believe landcare needs rigour in knowing its capacity
in designing and creating initiatives that will have
impact and influence.
Relevance to ensure actions are appropriate to the issue
and community.
Relationships that inspire us to foster a network that
builds on success and learns from failures in the past.
In the reality of increasing complexity and uncertainty,
partnerships relationships and collaborations
are crucial to developing innovation
to meet our needs and aspirations.
Now partnerships see us sharing ideas, constraints,
and solutions, harnessing the collective capacity
plus the occasional odd bod.
But how do we decide who to partner with?
Now, successful groups like BCG saw
partners that complemented their skill set, someone
that had street cred and a reputation for delivering.
The challenge is that we often know the locals, those
in the same sector as ourselves.
Landcare knows landcare.
Industry knows industry.
So we don't think about partnering those
that we do not know or don't have any relationship with.
We need people to inspire us, to inspire our industries
to change and build change.
We are all guilty of sticking with our favourite people,
those that we work with easily.
25 years ago, landcare was the result
of different stakeholders partnering with the enemy.
NFF and ICF, at the time.
Could we actually do that now?
What is landcare now?
6,000 groups, 56 regional authorities,
state and territory governments, national entities,
and 20 countries around the world are picking up
on the practise, movement, and philosophy.
It is bigger than the original context and concept.
It has grown organically.
But it requires a breadth and depth of partnerships
to nourish it.
It also requires a sophisticated approach to articulate what it
can offer, segmenting its market and establishing smart
partnerships, long-term, multifaceted partnerships with
funders, critical thinkers, policymakers, doers,
in order to banter, analyse, and critique innovations, products,
tools, and processes and logic.
Moulding and shaping great ideas to create a practise that makes
good business sense and supports viable and innovative
communities.
Landcare has changed the face of Australian agriculture,
not just in the landscape, but in the way extension
and adoption is structured, via groups.
Now in 2020, a national landcare survey
reported that 73% of Australian farmers
said they were part of some type of agriculture related group,
and that the largest grouping was local landcare and farming
systems groups.
Landcare was arguably the popular birth
of groups as a model for extension and adoption.
The results of that survey indicates that group delivery
remains important to the majority of Australian farmers.
Group delivery has over time become
specialised and segmented as farmers
have focused on the type of group
that best meets their needs.
Some groups focus on a narrow, specific set
of issues and others take a wider approach,
using the group structure to best meet their needs.
This is a slide I meant to show you.
One of these is originally says men and the other one
says women.
I'll let you choose undoubtedly those
that are the single-focus, multi-focus
that I've used to hide those names.
Now, one-third of farmers who took part in local landcare
groups and farming systems groups
cited these reasons for participating.
There we go.
Information tailored to local conditions and issues.
Hands on field days that are locally relevant.
Social networks.
And the opportunity to see what others are doing.
We always like to look over the fence.
The what's in it for me concept in action.
Partnerships between farmers, conservationists,
and government are evolving to partnerships including
business, community, and in some cases, philanthropy.
And here we are.
I'm keen to grow.
But are they evolving to the scale and maturity required?
And then, how do we capture and measure
the input and benefits each partner contributes or accrues
from the partnership?
Hold off a minute, Dennis.
If we can't articulate these, we certainly can't measure them.
Our understanding of landcare in Australia
is missing a vital component.
And although the environmental and agricultural outcomes
have been well explored, the many other benefits of landcare
and the natural resource management beyond these domains
have for the most part been anecdotally acknowledged.
Recognising this in 2013, the Australian Landcare Council
commissioned a piece of work, "The Multiple
Benefits of Landcare," to establish
the extent of the evidence base and how
to build this further into a more robust case for investment
into landcare.
Education.
There are six areas of multi-benefits education
which has been well established and understood.
And there are a range of positive and educational
outcomes for individuals, for example, continuous learning
and skill development, through to the broader community,
spreading awareness and delivering innovation.
Landcare and farmer groups offer both formal and informal
educational mechanisms.
Social and community health and well-being.
A complex array of benefits but quite considerable.
Landcare and farmer groups not only
provide a venue, an avenue for very real connection
with the natural environment, but also
lead to increased levels of social networking
and participation, both of which can contribute
to physical and mental well-being.
The agricultural and environmental outcomes
of landcare, a healthier living environment,
also contribute to help individuals and communities.
Political and social capital, a vital part
of social fabric and absolutely critical for community fitness
and future prosperity.
The dynamic social relationships and cohesion
that develop through landcare and farmer groups
can form an intrinsic part of social fabric,
in many cases filling gaps in community
beyond the agricultural and environmental domain,
particularly for regional and rural communities,
with enhanced social capacity and cohesion, stronger
local governance, increased recognition of women
in rural communities, and self-empowerment
and fulfilment.
Economic.
A considerable set of numbers.
Not just the numbers of fences and trees.
Landcare can generate an economic return
in the order of two to five times the original investment.
And this economic benefit arises through access to labour,
equipment, expertise and training, financial assistance,
and increased farm profitability.
The scale of economic return is important,
with landcare contributing to individuals as well as regions.
Cultural benefits.
Increasing connections in new ways that are very old.
Significant benefits accrue from connection
with country, which has spiritual, social, physical,
and mental health, particularly for indigenous communities.
And resilience.
Resilient individuals, communities, and landscapes
are the end-state of the multiple benefits
of landscape and groups.
Resilience arises through the multiple benefits
being evident, heavily integrated, interdependent,
and mutually reinforcing.
And incorporate many of the key elements
that research suggests enhance resilience.
Landcare promotes the formation of networks
that allow communities to support each other
and can provide services beyond the agricultural and
environmental domain when faced with adversity.
So we know there are multiple benefits
from the landcare movement and philosophy.
My question is are we mature and experienced enough
to leverage these multiple benefits
in order to strengthen grassroots landcare?
But we're operating in a competitive space,
and attracting people to take the time
to understand landcare and experience the benefits,
is challenging.
On reflection, the loss of critical resources,
the introduction of layers of bureaucracy
to feed off the successful model, changes
in the world around us, created an environment
where landcare went into survival mode
and to some extent, is now in endurance mode.
To prep for this particular talk,
I put a call out on Twitter, seeking views on landcare.
The vast majority of responses were from people who felt
disconnected from a movement they had been associated with,
who felt landcare had lost its focus on productive
agriculture, sustainable agriculture,
that had cushioned the interaction between practical
landcare and the larger landcare authorities and programmes.
With a renewed focus on productivity,
as strongly articulated at this conference,
landcare needs to consider what, if any,
unintended consequences will impact, positive or negative.
Is landcare recognised as an enabler to achieve
productivity?
And if so, do we invest in capacity?
The future seems a long marathon,
and fitness of groupds and communities
due to all the things I've mentioned are amplified.
What is landcare?
How does it have relationships in the age of 140 characters?
How does it, or how do we, deliver
consumable and relevant content in an ancient landscape?
Can landcare leverage this age of brevity,
a symptom of the busyness of our modern-day worlds?
Yes, it can.
Landcare is a species capable of surviving and thriving
if we train for fitness and improve our fitness
for the marathon and the train that we have in our landscape
around us.
As farming and land essay management systems
become more varied and multifunctional,
and the processing and delivery chains become more complex,
we need networks and improve tools to aid decision making.
Information that does not reduce complexity and uncertainty
is useless.
Why?
Because uncertainty is a major constraint to decision making.
It results in paralysis and conservatism,
sticking to what we know, or in desperate decisions
and actions, adopting wacky ideas
as a way to find the solution.
And there are many responses to complexity.
Some of these you'll do yourself at times and others apply
to organisations.
We avoid, delay, or defer a decision.
We take steps to reduce uncertainty
by collecting more and more and more information.
We avoid complexity by reducing the decision
to something that is just good enough rather than based.
We focus on incremental measures rather than
those that fundamentally change things.
And we seek to reduce conflict of interest or perceptual
differences by talking, and hence the term
all talk and no action.
If we want healthy industries in the future,
we need organisations and information that assists
decision-makers, farmers, landscape managers,
or policy makers, whoever they may be,
by reducing uncertainty and complexity.
And this is a role for a fit landcare group,
and a landcare movement, and a philosophy.
Farmer land management will increasingly demand information
from multiple functions.
So being clear on the multi-benefits
and not leaving them to others to claim and deliver on
is a leader.
I'm not saying that this is easy.
Darwin did not call it survival of the fittest
because it was easy.
There will be casualties.
And our maturity as a landcare movement and practise will
determine if we learn and adapt from those losses.
We had innovation, intellect, creativity, and commitment
in our communities, and dare I say it,
in the people who make up government departments
and in landcare.
Let's harness it.
Build new partnerships with deeper understanding
of what landcare can facilitate, and train ourselves
to be fit for purpose and continue
the amazing legacy that is and will be landcare.
Thank you very much.