Category Archives: Agriculture

232 – Agricultural extension in 10 years

22 February, 2013 – 12:05 pm

Sally Marsh and I wrote an article for the Australian Farm Institute titled “Public-sector agricultural extension: what should it look like in 10 years?”. Here it is.

Our focus is on what should happen in the public sector, on the grounds that it is not helpful to ask what “should” happen in the private sector. The private sector will develop in response to commercial opportunities available to them, irrespective of what we might think should happen.

To set the context, here are some predictions about the environment within which extension will operate. Agriculture will continue to change in response to technology, markets and climate. Cutbacks we have seen in funding for public-sector agricultural extension will not be reversed and may continue. The dismantling of extension infrastructure and capacity in the public sector has gone too far for it to be reversed without major new public investments, and we don’t foresee those occurring. Private sector capacity in extension will continue to grow – including extension provided by purchasers of agricultural products (e.g. dairy, horticulture, sugar), input suppliers (e.g. fertiliser, feeds) and farm management specialists. There will be continuing increases in the average size of farms, and in the number of corporate farms, with resulting growth in the vertical integration of information services (~ “extension”) into farm businesses. There will continue to be growth in the use of advanced information and communication technologies in agriculture, providing information to farmers in novel ways. Falling numbers of graduates from agricultural programs could create a serious challenge to extension services (public and private) to obtain employees with the required knowledge and skills.

In this context, is there a need for ongoing public investment in agricultural extension? We believe that there is. Public-sector agricultural extension can continue to play important roles that address various market failures.

One key role is to foster two-way information flows between researchers and farmers. Information flow from farmers to researchers is needed to ensure that the research conducted will be beneficial to farmers and likely to be adopted by them. Some researchers already have sufficiently strong relationships with their farmer audience not to need this sort of help from extension agents, but many others don’t. The traditional role of extension agents in promoting uptake of beneficial new research results (technologies, systems and practices) should continue. We do not share the negative view of technology transfer that seems to exist among some theorists of extension. We believe that technology transfer and approaches such as participatory research and farmer-to-farmer learning are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, these latter approaches, as part of a broad portfolio of extension methods, can make valuable contributions to the success of technology transfer in appropriate circumstances. Farmer groups and organisations such as the Grower Group Alliance (www.gga.org.au) have key roles to play in this process.

Given that public budgets for extension are unlikely to grow, and may shrink further, it will be crucial for public extension services to take a more business-like approach to prioritising their activities than they have commonly done in the past. Extension efforts should be focused on issues for which there would be substantial benefits to farmers from changing their practices, especially if those new practices would also generate benefits for the broader community (e.g. environmental benefits). Extension would not focus on practices that farmers already have good knowledge about and have decided not to adopt, because non-adoption is a clear signal that the practices do not generate large enough private benefits. The heterogeneity of farms and farmers should be recognised when looking at reasons for non-adoption. This more sophisticated approach to planning extension effort will require greater collection and analysis of information.

As important as social media and other modern communication methods will be, public extension should not rely on them exclusively, but should maintain a level of face-to-face communication. Farming is already socially isolating for some farmers, and with declining farmer numbers this may become a more widespread issue. It is likely that farmers will always put a high value on personal contact in extension.

Finally, we note that, in the past 20 years, public sector extension has been prominent in supporting natural resource management (NRM) policy for agriculture. It has been the go-to policy response of most government NRM programs. Unfortunately, these programs have often funded extension efforts without asking fundamental questions, such as, Are the practices we wish to promote actually adoptable by farmers? A more thoughtful, selective and evidence-based use of extension is needed in this policy context.

230 – Future climate change and wheat yields in Western Australia

16 December, 2012 – 11:34 am

The wheat-growing areas of Western Australia are predicted to experience adverse climate change during the 21st century. Of the three components of change (rainfall, temperature and CO₂) the first two are somewhat uncertain, but current modelling evidence suggests that great pessimism about future yields is probably not warranted.

Although there was quite substantial climate change in the Western Australia wheatbelt during the 20th century, it had little or no adverse consequences for wheat yields (PD229). Of course, it doesn’t follow that the same will hold during the 21st century. That will depend on the details of how much change occurs, and at what time of year it occurs. These details are highly uncertain.

Even the general pattern of future climate change is inherently uncertain, particularly in the long term. It depends in part on global emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn depend on economic activity, technology change and climate policy measures over the relevant time frame. Uncertainty about each of these factors is high and increases with the length of time frame. In addition, the world’s climatic system is complex, chaotic and imperfectly understood, so that there is additional uncertainty inherent in the results of global circulation models, the tools used to predict climate.

Uncertainty is greater at the regional scale than at the global scale. And it is greater still when it comes to the within-year timing of changes in rainfall and temperature. We really have little idea about those timings, although they can be crucial in determining the consequences for crop yields (PD229).

Rainfall

Adverse changes in rainfall probably have the largest potential to reduce crop yields. Large reductions in September rainfall would be especially damaging. Unfortunately, rainfall is the factor about which we have the greatest uncertainty. Loosely speaking, regions that are already relatively wet are predicted to get wetter, and regions that are relatively dry (such as the Western Australian wheatbelt) are predicted to get drier, but in truth the models aren’t good enough to give us confidence about what will really happen in any particular place. CSIRO (2007) (somewhat heroically) predicted changes in annual average rainfall for the south-west of -20% to +5% by 2030 and -60% to +10% by 2070 relative to the period 1980-1999.

If the real results do fall within these ranges, 2030 would probably not be catastrophic, unless it includes a large reduction in early-spring rainfall. Clearly, -60% in 2070 would be catastrophic, but it’s the extreme case. Something nearer the midpoint of that range (-20%) would probably be damaging but not catastrophic. The real message about 2070 is that we have huge uncertainty about what rainfall will do – the range of the CSIRO predictions is 70%!

Temperature

By 2050, increases in temperature could perhaps be somewhere in the range of 1 to 3 °C. A positive impact on yield of temperature increases up to 1–3 °C has been reported from relevant crop modelling results when assuming that temperatures increase by the same amount every day across the growing season. Positive yield impacts come from accelerated plant development, leading to avoidance of high maximum temperatures and water stress during grain filling.

On the other hand, if the higher temperatures happen to include an increased frequency of extreme temperatures during grain filling, the result could be very negative. There is a potential for yield reductions of 5% for each day of extreme heat during grain filling.

Again, there is high uncertainty. Future temperature changes could be positive, negative or neutral for crop yields in Western Autralia.

CO₂

CO₂ fertilization of crops is a significant part of the climate/CO₂ story (Attavanich and McCarl, 2012). In future, CO₂ concentrations are likely to increase at about about 4 ppm per year. This is predicted to increase yields of current wheat cultivars in Western Australia by 15–30% over the next 50 years (Asseng and Pannell, 2012). Percentage increases in yield are likely to be greater in dryer agricultural regions, mainly due to increased water-use efficiency. Compared to the changes in rainfall and temperature, the increases in CO₂ are fairly certain. They are also constant all year, avoiding the tricky problem of predicting the within-year distribution of changes.

Highly adverse changes in rainfall and temperature would be really catastrophic for farmers in the Western Australian wheatbelt, but more likely the overall impacts will be moderate, particularly when the positive yield effects of CO₂ fertilization are factored in.

Reinforcing that judgement, another new paper (Potgieter et al., 2012) concludes that, under a high-emissions scenario, different shires would see changes in crop yields by 2050 of −5% to +6% across most of Western Australia (and Victoria and southern New South Wales), even without allowing for CO₂ fertilization.

I was surprised at how favourable those results are, especially considering that they are for a high-emission scenario. If they are accurate, then any negative impacts would be outweighed by the positive effects of CO₂ fertilization.

I remember reading the original report of the Garnaut review, and being struck by how much it emphasised the risks to agriculture when justifying Australia’s need for a strong policy response to climate change. There certainly are risks to agriculture, but this evidence suggests that they are not as compelling a policy driver as Garnaut indicated. If Potgieter et al. are right, then I would expect that the ongoing decline in public investment in agricultural research will have far worse consequences for agriculture.

This Pannell Discussion draws on part of a paper I’ve recently published with Senthold Asseng, who’s now at the University of Florida (Asseng and Pannell, 2012).

229 – Past climate change and wheat yields in Western Australia

10 December, 2012 – 1:43 am

The wheat-growing areas of Western Australia experienced substantial climate change (particularly rainfall decline) during the 20th century. However, the resulting impacts on wheat yields were negligible, even after factoring out changes in technology and prices.

Western Australia is by far the largest grain-crop-producing state of Australia, and wheat is by far its main crop.

The wheatbelt underwent significant climate change during the 20th century, commencing even before climate change was a high-profile issue. The region has had a 20% rainfall decline over the past 110 years, more than any other wheat-growing region in Australia.

There has been a specific pattern to the rainfall decline, with most of it occurring in winter. Figure 1 shows a typical example, for the Mullewa region.

Figure 1. Average monthly rainfall for Mullewa for 1945–1974 (filled bars) and 1975–2008 (open bars)

The other important climatic variable is temperature. Average temperature in the region has increased slightly (0.8 °C) over the past 50 years, but there has been a disproportionate increase in the frequency of hot days during grain filling (Asseng et al. 2011), when wheat yields are adversely affected by high temperatures. Some of that impact may have been off-set by increases in temperature during winter, which helps to increase yields.

Ludwig et al. (2009) used crop modelling to investigate the effects of past climate change on crop yields over the past 60 years, across various locations of the Western Australian wheatbelt. Remarkably, they concluded that there has been no change in wheat yield potential. The reasons they proposed for the lack of impact of reduced rainfall are:

Crops have low demand for water during the cool winter months in which the decline has occurred
Given the unpredictability of weather, farmers do not apply sufficient inputs (particularly fertilizer) to achieve the higher yields that are theoretically possible in wet years, and
Most Western Australian soils have low water-holding capacity, so a large proportion of unused water is lost below the root zone of crops.

A third change, not considered by Ludwig et al. (2009), has been the increase in atmospheric CO₂. Higher CO₂ has presumably contributed to the climatic changes (especially tempterature) but has another effect on crop yields, through so-called “CO₂ fertilization” (Attavanich and McCarl, 2012). Increases in atmospheric CO₂ concentration over the past 50 years have increased wheat yields in Western Australia by approximately 2–8 %.

Overall, I think it’s quite interesting and surprising that, despite really significant changes in climate in the region, these changes have had no significant negative impact on yields, especially when CO₂ fertilization is factored in.

It highlights that the specific details of the climate changes (such as their within-year timing) really matter. Changes that would be damaging at one time of the year can be benign at another. This makes it even harder to accurately predict the impacts of future climate changes, even if we get their average magnitudes right (which is already tough).

At the same time as climate change was having no impact on wheat yields in Western Australia, other things were having big positive impacts, including changes in crop varieties, increased fertiliser use, herbicides, reduced tillage, improved machinery allowing earlier sowing, retention of crop residues, and the use of ‘break’ crops that reduce root diseases. These have combined to increase average wheat yields in the region by around 100% over the past 30 years.

Some scientist have argued that farmers in this region should already be making changes to adapt to climate change. In the light of these results, that advice seems misguided.

This Pannell Discussion is based on part of a paper I’ve recently published with Senthold Asseng, who’s now at the University of Florida (Asseng and Pannell, 2012).

227 – ‘Disadoption’ after a project ends

22 October, 2012 – 8:35 am

There are various programs and projects around the world that aim to encourage farmers to adopt a new practice of one sort or another. It’s not uncommon to observe farmers participating in such projects, but then reverting to their old practices once the project ends. What are the implications of this?

If a program has a limited life, it is usually most realistic to assume that funding for projects will be temporary. Examples include Australia’s national natural resource management programs (Caring for our Country, the Natural Heritage Trust, and the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality) which provided one-off funding for projects, usually three years or less. Assuming that we want benefits from these programs to be enduring (which we surely do), we would seek to avoid the sort of scenario I outlined above, where farmers abandon the new practices once the flow of program money ends.

This implies that these programs should be careful in targeting their resources to promotion of practices that that are expected to provide positive net benefits to the target farmers. That is, they are practices that, once the farmers learn about them, will be attractive enough to be continued without ongoing support.

This sort of thinking seems to me to have been completely absent from the above programs, and from many other temporary programs around the world. For example, last week I attended an interesting workshop on Conservation Agriculture in Africa and South Asia, and there seem to have been many examples in that space of temporary ‘adoption’ that was abandoned once projects ended.

Once this has occurred, the logical response is to cease any further efforts to promote the activity, unless you have strong reasons to expect that the circumstances have changed significantly. Examples of relevant changes could include: a new version of the practice has been developed that will perform better for these farmers, a policy barrier to its adoption has been removed, or commodity prices have changed in a way that makes the practice more attractive.This sort of ‘disadoption’ actually gives us powerful insights into the practice that was being promoted. The farmers have tried out the practice in their own context, and decided to stop doing it, so they are making a relatively well-informed judgement that the practice does not suit them. This is clearer and more powerful than simply observing that a practice has never been adopted in an area. If it has never been tried out, you probably can’t be sure that it wouldn’t work if it was tried. But if it has been tried and then abandoned, you can be relatively sure about it.

Unfortunately, this sort of common-sense response often doesn’t occur. In the national salinity program we found cases where farmers had been paid repeatedly to ‘adopt’ perennial pasture, but had ‘disadopted’ it each time. In Africa, relatively untargeted promotion of Conservation Agriculture has persisted despite it being well known that ‘adoption’ often evaporates once programs end.

A key understanding is that participation in these sorts of programs does not actually constitute adoption. From the farmer’s perspective, it’s really a case of farmers trialing the practice to see if it works sufficiently well for them. (That’s why I’ve put ‘adoption’ in quotes above.) The benefit of the program is that it allows farmers to make better-informed decisions about adoption, whether or not those decisions are to adopt the practice.

The other implication is that funding that would have been spent on promoting non-adoptable practices should be diverted to other uses. That could include promoting those practices to farmers who have been carefully assessed as being likely to adopt after trialing, or focusing on ways to improve the attractiveness of the practices, instead of promoting them in their current form.

223 – Leadership

2 September, 2012 – 8:45 pm

Strong, inspiring, visionary leadership can have a huge influence on people, pulling them together and changing their direction. But is it the only thing that can achieve that? And is it necessarily a good thing?

I participated in a very interesting discussion about leadership this week. One of the participants was a radio astronomer who had been involved in the successful bid for the Square Kilometre Array project in Western Australia – a massive undertaking. She said that a key factor in getting radio astronomers to overcome their differences and unify behind the bid was a small number of outstanding leaders in the discipline. Most people in the discussion were agricultural scientists, and they were discussing whether agricultural scientists could also get a large, visionary national project funded in Australia and what could be learnt from the SKA experience.

One of agriculturalists argued that leadership is not just important for change, it is essential — that you generally don’t see big changes occur across a large group of people where the change propagates from the bottom up. That was quite thought provoking, and at the time I couldn’t think of a counter example.

Later on I identified a couple of economics-related examples where major changes regularly happen without any leadership at all. One is our adoption of new technologies. Think of Steve Jobs and Apple. No doubt, Jobs was the archetype of a strong, inspiring, visionary leader within Apple, and had a huge influence on the company and its staff. But outside the company, it was different. We didn’t all buy ipods, iphones, ipads and ikettles because we were inspired and led by Steve Jobs. (Well, maybe a few did, but mostly not.) We did it because these are great products, and perhaps because Apple has a cool reputation. Millions of us changed our behaviour towards purchase of Apple products, and that in turn further influenced our behaviour in myriad ways, but there was no unifying leader that directly influenced us to change in these ways.

Another example is the behaviour of people in markets. Markets can have a major influence on the behaviour of people by the simple mechanism of pricing. If there is a shortage of a product (say, wheat), the price is bid up. This encourages more producers to produce wheat, and it encourages consumers of wheat to cut back on their wheat consumption, so the shortage is addressed. The wonder of the market is that there is no leadership required for this to happen. It occurs efficiently and reliably through the aggregation of many individual decisions.

Could these examples provide a different way (other than by leadership) to bring agricultural scientists together, to push them in a particular new direction? Perhaps it would be possible to think about the incentives that scientists face and influence their behaviour by modifying those incentives. That might mean that we wouldn’t need inspiring leadership, but I think we would still require strong leadership with a clear vision to arrange for the new incentives to be put in place. So for this particular type of change, my feeling is that the comment was right; leadership is crucial.

My other thought about this, though, is that we should be careful what we wish for. The directions that leaders take us in are not necessarily good ones. In the agricultural context, I’d point to the history of salinity in Australia. The profile of salinity as a problem for agriculture (as well as for water, biodiversity and infrastructure) grew through the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the creation of the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality in 2000. A small number of high-profile scientist leaders/advocates were pivotal in the creation of this $1.4 billion program. It was the one of the biggest environmental programs in Australia’s history, and its creation must have seemed like a huge success for those who had been pushing for it. But in fact the program was fundamentally misconceived. It would have needed to be designed and delivered in entirely different ways to have any chance of meeting its objectives. In the wake of its obvious failure, resources for salinity management and salinity research have almost completely dried up. So the apparent major success of getting a huge national program established was actually the beginning of the end of the issue as a national priority.

Category Archives: Agriculture

232 – Agricultural extension in 10 years

Further reading

230 – Future climate change and wheat yields in Western Australia

Rainfall

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CO₂

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229 – Past climate change and wheat yields in Western Australia

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227 – ‘Disadoption’ after a project ends

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Category Archives: Agriculture

232 – Agricultural extension in 10 years

Further reading

230 – Future climate change and wheat yields in Western Australia

Rainfall

Temperature

CO2

Further reading

229 – Past climate change and wheat yields in Western Australia

Further reading

227 – ‘Disadoption’ after a project ends

Further reading

223 – Leadership

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Recent Posts

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