Video - GRDC determined to deliver on RD&E

By: "Farm Tender" News
Cattle News
Sep 10, 2018
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Purpose: To invest in research, development and extension to create enduring profitability for Australian grain growers Key performance indicator: Minimum 6.0% rate of return by 2023

Watch the video here - https://youtu.be/omdYMIVZxWk

Consultation with growers, researchers and the wider grains industry has identified 30 KITs that underpin the delivery of the GRDC’s purpose. A full strategy for the delivery of each KIT will be developed over the period of this RD&E plan. The GRDC has worked with a range of stakeholders to determine the relative urgency of developing and implementing each KIT strategy.

Utilising a program logic framework, each strategy will clearly outline:

Kit Purpose

Current data from ABARES surveys provides valuable insights into the performance of grain growers at a national scale but does not allow for more localised assessments and comparisons of performance. The GRDC is working with a range of stakeholders to determine the level of support and most appropriate methodology required for the collation of more localised farm performance data. Ultimately, analysis of more localised data over multiple years would allow not only a more informed assessment of farm performance but also the identification of new investments required to create enduring profitability and the exposure of gaps in adoption of new knowledge.

Kit Objectives

Objectives will be monitored over a longer timeframe, as the cumulative impacts of KITs. The GRDC will utilise a combination of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and ABARES, information from industry and other survey data to track improvements and/or declines in achieving objectives, but will need to make assumptions to attribute effects to RD&E outputs and outcomes.Measures will make wide use of case studies to describe the links between RD&E and practice change at the farm or industry levels.

For example, it is well established that planting at the optimum time has a major impact on grain yield potential but the time of planting is constrained by the need to manage the risk of frost (in sowing earlier) and the risk of heat and terminal drought (in sowing later). RD&E investments to expand the frost and heat tolerances of crops could deliver crop varieties that can facilitate both earlier and later plantings, to manage risk and maximise yield. However, it is difficult to accurately quantify the exact improvement that investment in tolerance of extreme heat has had on yield, given that a range of other factors also influence yield. Case studies provide an important tool for inferring or estimating the impact of such RD&E and demonstrating its adoption.

Overviews of KIT strategies will be communicated widely and reviewed regularly to assess performance and adjust focus in line with agile investment processes.

Deliverables

The ultimate way to assess the GRDC’s performance in delivering on its purpose is to measure the impact of the GRDC’s RD&E investments on Australian grain growers’ profitability.

However, this is complicated by factors such as the following:

* The grains industry is very complex and varies greatly across location, farming system, farm type, enterprise mix and the specific financial circumstances of individual grain-growing businesses (e.g. equity). Measures of profitability vary widely between farms and even across seasons within a single farm. Arriving at performance indicators that have relevance at a national level is therefore difficult.

* There is no single collection of profit data across the grains industry to support measurement. Some private sector advisers, however, do currently collect some financial performance data to assist their clients, particularly in business benchmarking exercises.

* The long lag times between the conduct of R&D, the adoption of R&D outcomes on farm, and the impact of those outcomes on profit, as well as the number of interacting variables that can affect profit, make it difficult to directly link R&D investments to impacts.

The GRDC will aim to develop new impact assessment tools during the life of this five-year plan. Of major importance will be the establishment of farm performance data sets that allow the collection of data from like farms (e.g. based on region, enterprise mix or size) for analysis of trends in yield, price, input costs and management of risk that will inform future RD&E priorities. Aggregation of the data will also allow for more accurate assessment of the impact of GRDC RD&E investments.

The GRDC’s performance measurement framework will be dynamic, and will be continually reviewed and updated as new information is generated and new learnings on best practice are adopted. The GRDC aims to work with industry to develop performance measures that are relevant locally, regionally and nationally.

Download the overview plan here - https://rdeplan.grdc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/grdc-rde-overview-plan-2018-23.pdf

Download the full plan here - https://rdeplan.grdc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/grdc-rde-full-plan-2018-23.pdf