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The dairy farms systems research that we conduct at the DPI it's innovative in that it emphasises
a whole farm approach, which is really the only way you can do systems research is look
at the whole system. And we focused on will a change to a farm system improve its productivity
and profitability? And we were trying to answer the questions that farmers themselves are
asking when they look to the future. They know that the world's going to change around
them, they know that their current system won't be adequate when their costs rise and
their prices fall and policies change and they get confronted with carbon prices and
world prices go up and down and droughts come along. So farmers all the time have to adapt
their systems, so they're always asking the question: what sort of changes should I make
and which changes would be most profitable. So they're the questions that our team in
the dairy farm systems research team investigate and we do that in a unique way by having a
steering committee based mainly of farmers and consultants and scientists and economists,
and we use their advice to help us analyse a real case study farm that's facing these
big questions.
So the focus is on the big questions and choosing the best answer that is going to help the
farmer achieve their goals. And that information from the whole farm analysis about profitability
and risk is then extended out to farmer groups, but it also is used in policy as well and
during the drought and answering questions about water policy. So this whole project
provides information to farmers, provides information to government policymakers, but
it also provides information to researchers by identifying what we call the gaps in the
knowledge, which is bits of research, bits of science we don't have and yet we need to
have in order to understand the system fully. And so out of this dairy farm systems research
that we've conducted has come a number of research projects that we've been running
here at Ellinbank and those questions were identified by us modelling the whole farm
system, a real farm system, walking a real farm system with the real farmer, modelling
our system, working out the productivity and profitability changes that might work and
identifying the scientific research questions that we need to know more about. That information
is then used to make a case to funders like Dairy Australia and out of that comes new
research projects and new information and we move on and that's called progress.
The other unique thing, I guess, about this approach is we emphasise a number of goals
of farms and risk and change because what we say is farming is all about change; it's
all about adapting to changed circumstances. Our starting point is the status quo is not
an option. If you're standing still, you're going backwards, basically, in farming. So
it's all about which of the alternative futures that I could pursue would be the one that
would contribute most to me achieving my goals and the criteria is always benefits and risk
because different farms have different views about risk, are at different stages of their
life, so it's not just about which change might make the most profit; it's profit versus
risk because risk is a very important part of systems and the thing that's often overlooked
in farming is the constant change that is involved and so what we do it we identify
change, we use a steering group of farmers to identify potential changes, sensible changes
for a particular system and it might come down to two or three options.
We'll analyse each of those options over a planned period of five, six, seven, eight,
ten years and then we go back to the farmer and say well, here are the options - this
one will give you a certain addition to your wealth, a certain amount of profit, but it's
got a certain amount of risk, and compare that with this other option, which will also
achieve many of your goals, it might be less profitable, it might be less risky, but it
might have less risk. And so the farmer can then weight that up and that's what happens
in practice. So we try and mimic with our research the situation farmers are facing.
We try and mimic the choices they have and we try and identify which of those choices
would be the right way for them to go. Now that information from a particular case farm
is relevant to similar farmers in similar situations and so we then have extension programs
then to put that information out to farmers. And then it also has an education role in
that sort of by stealth we end up teaching farmers some more information about analysing
the profit, about thinking about risk, about thinking about change, which they are doing
implicitly, and we try and make it a bit more explicit, a bit more informed.