Globalisation causes continual change in the dairy industry, creating new opportunities and risks in countries, states, and regions. To survive and benefit from these changes, stakeholders from across each country's dairy industry need to co-operate to develop alternatives for their regions. The Australian and Brazilian dairy Research, Development and Extension (R,D&E) organisations recognise this need in their mission statements. They also have some initiatives for more effective interaction with the stakeholders in their dairy industries. In the 1990s Australia created Regional Dairy Programs, including a Subtropical Dairy Program (SDP) for tropical and subtropical areas of east Australia, to gather demands from the production regions in order to design R,D&E. To promote interaction between R,D&E efforts and agricultural industries the Australian government matches expenditure on R,D&E dollar for dollar. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation for Dairy (Embrapa Dairy) developed the Platform Project, with the objective of identifying constraints on dairy development in Brazil's main dairy production regions. Embrapa Dairy has also moved researchers to those regions to establish a link between stakeholders and the head research station in the design of R&D. There remains room for improvement in both countries' methods. In Australia's SDP, priorities for R,D&E are identified by regional teams consisting mostly of farmers and R,D&E people, but an evaluation has recommended involving a broader range of stakeholders to increase the diversity of ideas. In Brazil, dairy R&D priorities are identified mostly through quantitative surveys with farmers or panels of experts who consider large regions (of more than three states), without deeper involvement of farmers. Models and approaches in extension and systems thinking offer ideas for more effective and comprehensive approaches. The objectives of this study were to: 1. Develop a strategy to: - Involve a broad set of stakeholders in a dairy community to obtain a holistic view of their priorities for R,D&E, and - Help R,D&E people to understand the dairy farms and the production realities of small regions. 2. Document and compare the R,D&E priorities of dairy stakeholders in one Australian and two Brazilian regions, including the views of different groups of stakeholders within each region. Regional studies were conducted in three dairy regions, one region in the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and two regions in Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil. The research method within each region studied combined three approaches, each involving a variety of stakeholders from across the production communities. These were familiarisation through staying on a farm and building trust; individual interviews with a diversity of stakeholders from farmers to off-farm enterprises and R,D&E staff, and focus group interviews with participants selected from those already interviewed individually. The focus groups verified and enlarged upon the findings of the individual interviews, and enabled convergence among the participants' views. The three approaches produced complementary results. The strategy for eliciting R,D&E priorities worked equally well in all three case studies. Across the three cases, the individual interviews pointed out previously unrecognised R,D&E priorities, going beyond production technologies into issues such as communication, farm management, labour and finance. Pasture issues also remained important. The results from the focus group interviews corroborated communication, farm management and finance as important priorities for R,D&E, while adding marketing, industry policy and organisation of farmers, issues which had not stood out originally in the individual interviews in any of the three regions studied. This suggests a number of things. In terms of strategy for developing R,D&E priorities, both individual interviews and group processes are valuable, and may provide somewhat different outcomes. Further, the primary information needs for the industry lie beyond the farm and production technologies. The results also show that stakeholders would like R,D&E people to work as their partners in improving the dairy industry. The involvement of a broader range of stakeholders brought a more holistic and integrated view of each region's dairy development needs. It was particularly useful to engage people from throughout the dairy community with R,D&E practitioners in identifying priorities, since this broadened the picture of needs and showed the relative importance of production technologies alongside other, previously unrecognised needs. The results also suggest that research organisations should include staff capable of taking a more systemic view of dairy production systems, on- and off-farm, and potentially other industries. The academic significance of this study lies in the combination of systems thinking, stakeholder analysis and participation with extension science, towards a practical need.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/254296 |
| Creators | Teixeira, Sergio Rustichelli |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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