Summary

Recently the Australian Agriculture Minister indicated effective RD&E collaboration in key national areas including digital agriculture, climate, environment, and soil health is critical to improving overall productivity and resilience with Australian agriculture.
To address such inter-industry cross-sectoral issues that emerge with national rural issues (ENRI) will require an attitudinal shift to transformative and innovative solutions. To achieve this outcome requires investment higher risk, longer-term projects. Currently, the industry consultation and governance requirements make high-risk investments in cross-sectoral RD&E less attractive, particularly within a five-year time scale adopted by levied industries in their strategic planning. New and novel mechanisms that enable and encourage individual industries to identify investment in longer term higher risk transformative RD&E in ENRI may be required.
This project will use three highly credentialed consultants to develop consultative framework and engagement process to assist panel chairs in identifying the key cross-sectoral and inter-industry issues relative to these themes built around emerging and future national issues within ENRI.
This assessment will be used to develop a logic map required for the industries to identify, prioritise, and communicate threats and opportunities in big ticket issues to their key stakeholders. It will increase the capacity of panel chairs to engage their industries in planning and communication activities that promote greater investment in cross-sectoral, higher risk, more transformative and innovative solutions under ENRI.
The final component of the project will provide an assessment of the proposed future framework’s ability to underpin or be appropriately scaled up to include broader whole of agriculture engagement in the issues identified and in-line with investment by the LEI in RD&E within ENRI.

Program

All Levied Industries

Research Organisation

Rural Analytics Pty Ltd

Objective Summary

Levied and emerging industries (LEI) face several current and emerging cross-sectoral issues originating from their physical environment and consumer expectations for their products.
Climatic variability including drought, bushfires, and extreme temperatures threaten viability of individual business and the industry. It also changes industry competitiveness nationally and internationally placing pressure on sustainability.
Consumer and community expectations of agricultural sustainability and natural capital management increasingly influence the relationship between agricultural production and the environment. Globalisation is having a direct impact on Australian agricultural industries. Creating the ability to interface with shifting global environment and the emerging ecosystem for innovation requires a significant redesign of investment, RD&E logic and oversight.
AgriFutures Australia established the National Challenges and Opportunities theme in Arena 2 with the goal “To identify opportunities and issues that are common across rural sectors and nurture research and innovation to address these issues”. Fundamental to achieving this goal is the ability of AgriFutures Australia to assist its LEI to prioritise and invest in RD&E-to address opportunities and challenges common to multiple LEI within the ENRI framework.
This project will develop a consultative framework and engagement process to assist panel chairs to identify, prioritise and build investment logic for innovative intra and inter-industry solutions to critical issues. This includes a systematic examination of emerging and future issues related to productivity (technological innovation, welfare, producer skills and capacities, WHS, resource competition) and market compliance (polices, regulations, consumer trends, community aspiration) within ENRI. The framework will include a rapid assessment scoring model based on likelihood and magnitude of impact.