Informing extension project design: the right tool for the job

Payne, T. A.; Turner, James A.; Rijswijk, Kelly; McDermott, Alan; Wakelin, R.D.N.

doi:10.33584/rps.16.2016.3257

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 18 publications

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“…Blackstock et al [51] (p. 5637), for instance, note in relation to agricultural pollution that "no single approach or strategy for influencing farmers' behaviour to manage diffuse pollution in the context of climate change is likely to be sufficient". Similar arguments have been made about extension programmes in general, often with reference to multiple communication avenues and practice change components needed to improve programme efficacy [33,34,52,53]. As outlined above, researchers have already refined some of these insights in relation to weed and HR management.…”

Section: Discussion: Towards Improving Sector Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 84%

Opportunities for Improving Herbicide Resistance Management Strategies across New Zealand’s Arable Sector

2023

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Herbicide resistance is increasingly recognised as a challenge for agricultural producers worldwide. International scholarship and practical experiences suggest that collective efforts by diverse agricultural stakeholders are crucial for effective resistance management. In New Zealand, such sector-wide initiatives and strategies remain fragmented, partly due to a lack of state coordination and national extension services. This article synthesises insights from three complementary social research methods involving actors across the country’s arable-crop-growing sector (focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and an industry workshop) to identify pathways to foster collaboration and more strategic resistance management. The presented findings detail challenges, opportunities, and potential actions across four domains: strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand’s farming context, better information and knowledge exchange, improved collaboration and coordination, and targeted education and training. Our analysis highlights that most opportunities described within these domains involve purposely strengthening existing, or forming new, social and institutional relationships as part of establishing resistance management as a shared sector responsibility. A portfolio of multipronged initiatives and programmes is then required for effective whole-industry strategies. We discuss potential next steps to collectively realise identified opportunities, from more immediately feasible steps to long-term activities. These insights conceptually contribute to the international scholarship on herbicide resistance by reinforcing the notion that industry leadership and meaningful farmer involvement are indispensable for more collaborative approaches aimed at strategically managing resistance.

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Section: Discussion: Towards Improving Sector Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 84%

Opportunities for Improving Herbicide Resistance Management Strategies across New Zealand’s Arable Sector

2023

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Strategic, tactical, complex and simple changes to farm systems

Kaine,

Wright,

Vallance

2024

Syst Res Behav Sci

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Pressure has grown to reconfigure commercial farm systems to ameliorate resource degradation as governments have increasingly sought to halt or reverse the damaging effects of agriculture on the environment. Now, climate change is creating additional pressure to redesign farm systems to withstand more variable, and historically more extreme, seasonal conditions. Meeting these pressures is thought to require a combination of responses ranging from incremental adjustments to farm systems through to their complete transformation into entirely new enterprises. Implementing each of these entails different resources, time horizons, skills, knowledge and planning, and this has corresponding consequences for any government or industry policies intended to promote adoption or compliance. While there is an extensive literature on the adoption of technology and management practices in agriculture, the literature on different types of change to farm systems, and the criteria for distinguishing between types, is limited. We describe a novel approach to classifying changes to farm systems by integrating a method for describing the strategic and tactical flexibility of farm systems with a method for describing the complexity of changes to farm systems. The resulting classification provides a framework for inferring the nature of the resources, skills, knowledge, planning and time needed to implement the different types of change. We provide illustrative examples drawn from a series of interviews with farmers of each type of change and discuss the implications for extension, agricultural and environmental policy and policy regarding adaptation to climate change. We found that heterogeneity in farm systems translates into heterogeneity in adoption processes. We believe that our approach provides a practical way of translating commonly used broad descriptors of adaptation, such as ‘incremental’, ‘systems’ and ‘transformational’, into the specific type of the change that farmers must make to their farm systems to enact adaptations, with consequent implications for the effective policy support of adaptation.

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