Innovation is and always has been the cornerstone of our livestock industries.  It is something that occupies a fair bit of my downtime, wondering just how amazing the livestock industries could be if we could somehow align our efforts, remove the duplication and focus on the right things at the right time.  

Throughout history, innovation has come through a combination of science-trained research teams conducting considered experiments and farmers testing new things and modifying what they do.  There is now an evolving ag-tech sector which is fantastic to see and will continue to bring new opportunities to our industries.  Even with this evolving sector, there remains a big role for research and development in the more traditional sense.  If everyone stays in their lane there should be a natural synergy between ag-tech developments and government and industry funding.  Government and industry funding should focus on market failure, that is, areas where viable solutions from incumbents or newcomers in the industry are unlikely to materialise.  It also should be directed where big chunks of the industry will benefit even if they don’t engage. Industry-wide genetic evaluation is just one good example of this. The ongoing research effort required to develop new methods and techniques and to incorporate new data sets and knowledge would be too great for a commercial company to tackle unless it had some way of commercialising the resultant genetic gain. Equally, even though not all farmers fully engage in genetic evaluation the improvements made as a result of the investment flow through to a more vibrant and viable industry that all involved in the industry benefit from.  I’m just using that as an example it is not the point of this article.

This article follows loosely from the one I wrote last week about belief.  I am eternally intrigued by the enormous gap that sits between the most productive and profitable farms in a region and the lowest performers in the same region.  Whether the focus is closing the gap (that is reducing the variation) or shifting the entire population to a more profitable place is also up for discussion.  Normal distributions exist in every population (almost) regardless of how you characterise them, so the reality is probably that we can’t close the gap but we can shift the whole population by focussing on new technologies or methods that help the best do better.

The question I want to tackle here is what is the best way of defining and resourcing the most important priorities for investment.  But, before I do that I quickly want to say that this isn’t a commentary on any of the current organisations in this space or the dedicated people within them. My purpose is to get people thinking about the process because from time to time many people get asked about their preferences for research and development spending, whether formally or informally.  The tendency is for us to propose the things that matter most to us personally. For scientists that will be their particular area of focus, for farmers their greatest current pain point and for governments whatever is most closely aligned to their election promises or ideals. My question is: does that result in the most appropriate allocation of resources for research across the sector? 

Five issues can result from current approaches:

1. We don’t know what we don’t know

No one is ever going to lobby for a solution that doesn’t exist yet or that they are not aware of. “No one asked for the iPhone”

Generally speaking, most teams deciding on strategic plans, writing research proposals or contributing to advisory groups are very knowledgeable in their topic, region or farming system but rarely exposed to the latest developments in other areas of science or technology

2. The loudest voices win

This is a result of the generally low engagement in many of the processes that lead to research strategy setting. Hats off to those who do engage and work to get their area of interest funded but by definition this won’t result in the best outcome for an industry unless there is accidental alignment

3. The timing and rate of funding isn’t aligned with the necessary skills to allocate and use it

Short timeframes of research projects followed by big buckets of money that need to be spent quickly result in a massive problem for both research teams and funding body managers.  This ‘lumpy’ process results in a lack of corporate knowledge, old things seeming new and the two problems pointed out above

4. We can further define the problem rather than finding a solution

Some problems don’t have an immediate solution and we head off investigating a problem but not in a way that can aid intervention or result in any output that results in a material change in the outcome.   That is, we can define all of the steps that result in a certain outcome but unless any of those steps have some alternatives (at scale) none of them will yield a viable solution.  

5. We focus on things within the industry rather than adjacent to it

The reality is that the livestock sectors aren’t big enough to attract the kind of money that consumer-facing products have directed their way.  We therefore need to look to re-deploy technologies and solutions for our problems rather than come up with our own solutions (as much as possible)

A better way

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Professor Andrew Thompson for the lion’s share of my career and as a result, have also worked closely with John Young.  This pair of legends, as far as I am concerned, have quietly gone about having a massive impact on the industry.  I should point out that these two don’t have any knowledge of this article so anything written here that you may take offence from has nothing to do with them and should only be directed toward me. 

I’ve learnt many things from these two over the years but the most useful one is how they go about deciding research priorities.  You could argue that it is just a Benefit-Cost Analysis and that these are commonplace across all funding and research institutions, but I think it is different in ways that make it game-changing.

This is a quick list of how they go about deciding priorities:

• Bio-economic modelling of a production system (or part of a production system) makes assumptions
• Some of these assumptions are guesses or extrapolations from partial datasets and are identified as knowledge gaps
• Focussed modelling on these knowledge gaps reveals which of these assumptions are the most sensitive to changes in terms of whole-of-system profitability and these are identified as priority knowledge gaps
• Work is completed to understand these knowledge gaps further in a way that would allow an industry-wide solution to be applied
• The research finds potential solutions that will have a material impact on sector profitability and nominates them forward to a development phase
• The development phase allows for paddock scale trialling where further nuances are determined and the modelling further informed
• The considered, economically proven, results are then moved into extension mode and promoted

The key here is that economics, practicality and science are intertwined because, in reality, they are!  

There are two additions that I think we try to make to this model with varying degrees of success.  Firstly, it is important to not only consider solutions that are currently well defined or possible.  The current rate of technological change means that something that isn’t possible or feasible today could be cheap and easy in a decade.   Secondly, and related, we need to consider cross-discipline and cross-industry thinking when we are in solution mode.  What is happening in medical research that might provide a breakthrough that can be deployed in livestock?  What shift in battery technology will change what is currently possible in wearables in livestock?  If we only consider developments within our industry we will never break down the barriers at the scale and rate we need to.

So, next time you are asked for your opinion about what should be research priorities please consider it carefully.  Focus your answers at a level that allows free thinking and as far as possible is free of personal biases.  

Finally, it is easy to take what we have for granted.  I am extremely grateful for the variety of mechanisms that are available to fund exploration into the future.  I don’t own any animals or have a farm so I don’t directly contribute to levies, however, I think the fact that there are levies and that governments are willing to match these levies provides us with a fantastic opportunity to bash down barriers.  The more efficiently we spend our resources the more barriers we will bash down.

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