The quiet rise of environmental extension

Many may think that the field of agricultural extension, in which farmers and graziers are – or were – provided with advice in order to farm better, has declined, if not largely disappeared in Australia. Certainly, it is no longer a role of agricultural departments as it was in the 1950s–1990s, but we argue it continues. Instead, the focus has shifted from agricultural production to environmental management, from farmers and graziers to include other types of landholders, and from agricultural departments to regional bodies for natural resource management and private providers.

Extension involves transferring information, knowledge and skills that enable individuals, organisations and businesses to improve economic, social and environmental outcomes (Beever 2016). The Australasia-Pacific Extension Network (2021) defines extension in a way that reflects this dual role:

Extension is about working with people in a community to facilitate change in an environment that has social, economic and technical complexity. This is achieved by helping people gain the knowledge and confidence so they want to change and providing support to ensure it is implemented effectively.

To offer a very brief history, agricultural extension began in Australia, so far as we know, in the late 1880s (Hunt et al. 2012). It was motivated by the need for national food security, while farmers contended with production in environments that differ markedly from those of Europe. Extension became prominent from the 1950s, with the establishment of the Australian Standing Committee on Soil Conservation and associated state institutions (Hannam 2003). It was boosted after the federal government began the National Soil Conservation Program in 1983, in its coordinating capacity (Hannam 2003), and state governments established soil and water conservation services.

Extension services were originally provided mainly by state government departments. In New Zealand, from the 1980s to 1990s government, particularly the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, funded agricultural extension as well as professional development for its staff to provide that advice.

In Australia, state government provision of extension declined from the 1990s – to a different extent in each state – with advisory services becoming largely a private sector role (Marsh and Pannell 2007; House of Representatives Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry 2007). In keeping with neoliberal approaches, the rationale (Stantiall and Paine 2000) was that the public purse should not be subsidising advice to farmers and graziers, even in-kind through staff advice. Farming, as a business, should pay for production and land management advice just like accounting advice. Hunt et al. (2012) also trace opportunities for the state governments to withdraw, while the Commonwealth was building up different research and development funding structures under a widespread set of policy changes focused on making the agricultural sector more competitive. The combined Research, Development and Extension role (known as RD&E) shifted towards the sectoral agricultural Research and Development Corporations, which funded research under industry levies with matching government funding, and disseminated research results to producers though mostly on a mass-communication basis, not as advice to individual or small groups of producers.

By 2000, the New Zealand government had also stopped direct funding of extension, on the same logic as Australia’s – that extension was a free consultancy that should be shifted to fee-for-service – though two New Zealand agricultural organisations (Livestock Improvement Corporation and Woolpro) continued with national extension teams for some time (Stantiall and Paine 2000). In New Zealand, the Crown Research Institutes, which conduct much agricultural research, extend their research to the public (Stantiall and Paine 2000). Meanwhile, the New Zealand Department of Primary Industries funds extension, particularly for catchment groups, through the New Zealand Landcare Trust – a not-for-profit organisation rather different from the Australian version of Landcare – as well as some specific projects (Ministry for Primary Industries 2021).

Any sense of decline in extension in Australia or New Zealand is contradicted by the strong membership base and sets of activities by the Australasia-Pacific Extension Network. This partially reflects the many champions of extension, and of its variants in terminology such as innovation, facilitating practice change and capacity building, among private practitioners, remaining and former government staff, and university teachers and researchers. There has, however, been a decline in the offering of extension teaching in universities, for reasons that partly reflect the decline of extension as a designated profession hence attractiveness to students, removal of employer training and professional development subsidies for their staff, and universities’ consolidation of teaching offerings under increasingly restrictive funding models.

For a complex set of reasons (see Marsh and Pannell 2007), aspects of previous farm extension activities including erosion control and pest control were taken up by the expanded Landcare movement in the 1990s, followed by the growth of regional natural resource management bodies in Australia from 2002 (and Regional Councils in New Zealand from 1991). Australia’s Decade of Landcare (1990–1999), which grew from an agreement between the agriculture and conservation peak bodies, the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1989, acknowledged that conservation cannot be restricted to formally declared protected areas; it needed to extend to privately held lands, including the large amounts of land in production. The partnership approach between conservation and agriculture was also adopted in Aboriginal lands, which are extensive, underfunded and deserve attention too. Thus, crop production advice, seen as a benefit to private businesses, was increasingly provided by the private sector, whereas pest and erosion advice and support had benefits and costs that extended beyond an individual’s property, justifying public expenditure.

Following the creation of 56 regional bodies for Natural Resource Management in Australia from 2002 onwards, the initial focus was on salinity and water quality on a regional scale (Curtis et al. 2014). Many of these bodies discovered they could only address such issues by engaging closely and using extension approaches with landholders. This has certain implications.

Regional NRM bodies and Landcare organisations often employ environmental graduates and staff, but there are three concerns. One is that environmental management training often lacks the rigorous skills in extension, engagement, communication and related social science fields that the previous agricultural extension training involved. Second, it is necessary to understand the relationship between landholders’ economic security, profitability and resources available for environmental management. The third issue is that tertiary education often artificially separates environmental and agricultural training, but to achieve many of the NRM bodies’ and Landcare objectives, environmental needs must be integrated with agricultural, as the Landcare visionaries originally intended. There is strong justification for better integration of agricultural and environmental training and ensuring that extension is a core element in this. This becomes even more imperative given the increasing uncertainty that climate change is causing for rural landholders.

While there are many cases that could illustrate the varied approaches in environmentally oriented extension, we draw on two in Queensland with which we are familiar. One, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) World Heritage Area, has an international profile, has been seriously affected by adjacent land management activities and has benefitted from rural extension supported by substantial national and State government funding. The other, Noosa hinterland, also of international interest due to its Biosphere Reserve status, is typical of many peri-urban areas adjacent to densifying urban landscapes, which ‘patch’ together support services.

From an initial workshop in the late 1980s (Baldwin 1989) to the present, scientists have been warning about downstream effects of catchment pollutant (sediment and nutrient) runoff from agricultural and urban land uses on inshore areas of the GBR (Brodie and Pearson 2016). Climate change has compounded the effect. The Australian and Queensland governments in 2016 announced the $45 million Great Barrier Reef Gully and Streambank Joint Program to focus on remediating erosion in Reef catchments. This was augmented by the $500 million Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program in 2018, bringing together government, scientific institutions, industry and the non-government sector staff (including regional bodies for natural resource management) working in partnership (Department of Agriculture Water and the Environment 2021). The Rural Jobs and Skills Alliance led by the Queensland Farmers Federation, and funded by the Queensland Government under its Reef Water Quality Program (Queensland Government 2021) supports extension in a variety of ways. It provides capacity building to extension and advisory personnel whether they be private suppliers, employed in industry bodies or in natural resource management organisations throughout the GBR catchments. It enhances their coordination and networking, and supports succession planning as experienced late-career extension staff retire. The program also provides placements for early career professionals (Queensland Government 2021).

While Noosa itself is a well-known tourist destination, its hinterland economy evolved from timber production to dairy, beef and horticulture production during the 1900s. Over time, approximately one-half of the land in the Noosa Biosphere Reserve (declared in 2007) became a protected area such as the national park, and farmland became more fragmented. Land use in the hinterland Biosphere ‘transition zone’ has become more multi-functional comprising traditional commercial farming, silviculture, niche farming such as coffee, fruit trees, herbs and herbal medicines, with increasing recognition of the potential for rural, farm and recreational tourism. A recent survey found that almost 60 per cent of rural respondents had been on their property for less than 10 years; a majority identified as ‘lifestyle’ or sustainable producers; and sought additional information about improving production (Social Deck and SOSJ Consulting 2019). Given the absence of agricultural extension, 66 per cent suggested collaboration as a way forward through sharing knowledge about production among farmers willing to pool their knowledge and to develop innovative local products and markets. A resulting concept paper also explored the possibility of carbon farming. This has implications for re-energising the relationship between Landcare and agriculture. In fact, Noosa and District Landcare is a great success story with over 30 employees, one of the largest non-government employers in the hinterland area. It is highly networked with over 100 volunteers, 36 significant partners and more than 100 clients (Lyth et al. 2017). The Landcare model, working in rural neighbourhood groups, may provide the foundation for fulfilling the demand for improvements in agricultural practices even though Landcare does not normally address production.

These two examples illustrate emerging patterns in extension, at different scales, that combine needs in environmental management and agriculture. Where Marsh and Pannell (2007) depicted private sector agricultural extension and provision of extension under Landcare as separate trends, the GBR example shows the need for their coordination. Both examples show that multi-disciplinary extension advice is still needed, not only to farmers and non-production landholders, but to those now advising landholders. We argue that the environmental management profession, and related organisations and collaborations, should continue to embrace, integrate and extend the advisory and capacity building role derived from agricultural extension. This entails recognising the many ‘people skills’ that can be learnt from extension practitioners, and enhancing social science training within environmental management degrees.

Articles in this issue

This issue features diverse biological, policy and socio-economic topics. It covers the regulation of biodiversity offsets; status of environmental outcomes in report cards; the role of roads in conserving sensitive landscapes; housing certification in New Zealand, residential water self-sufficiency and an economic assessment of coastal adaptation choices.

Linda Abdo, Sandy Griffin, Annabeth Kemp and Grey Coupland argue that gaps exist in the transparency, measurability and enforceability of regulations concerning biodiversity offsets in all Australian jurisdictions. The authors raise issues about the reliability of biodiversity offsets as a mechanism for allowing economic development to proceed without overall detriment to environmental and social values. In particular, the system weaknesses could contribute to the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and cast doubt on Australia’s meeting its international obligations.

Report cards are a useful way of informing managers and the public on the state of an environment, trends and responses to management actions. They involve combining carefully selected indicators to provide informative summary statistics, and communicating them in engaging ways. Nicole Flint, Amie Anastasi, Jeremy De Valck, Evan Chua, Adam Rose and Emma Jackson report on the pilot testing and early results of adding mud crabs, an iconic crustacean, to the report card for Gladstone Harbour. Mud crabs are relevant to managers and local people, given their role in commercial, recreational and Indigenous fisheries, and their biology is known. The article documents the process of developing and testing an environmental indicator.

Conservation requirements and management of visitors gain most of the attention in the management of protected areas. Ross Waldron and Adrian McCallum highlight the importance of road infrastructure as a conservation issue, in this case in a World Heritage Area, K’gari-Fraser Island. They provide an interesting history of roads on the island, and document the types of damage occurring due to high use, exacerbated by weather. Erosion and deep cuttings, which have impacts on surrounding vegetation and habitats, suggest roads require management attention, and a more sustainable transport system is needed.

Returning to the issue of regulation, this time in housing, Rochelle Ade and Michael Rehm examine green certification in New Zealand’s housing. Many New Zealand homes are cold, damp and difficult to heat. This raises issues of indoor air quality, especially in the autumn and winter months. The authors compare moisture levels in three categories of housing in Auckland, to assess whether internal humidity can be rectified through green building certification. They found that newly constructed houses under the main building code, 6-Homestar, offered poor humidity control, marginally better than uncertified ‘vintage’ houses. They suggest that certifications that specify airtightness levels and require active ventilation, such as Passive House, be considered by policy-makers in order to achieve warm, dry, low-carbon, houses in New Zealand.

In another study involving housing, Carrie Wilkinson and Leah Gibbs examine the practices, experiences and perceptions of households that are self-sufficient for water in a rural, coastal area of New South Wales, Australia. Households that are not connected to mains water take their own responsibility for capture, storage, consumption and disposal of domestic water. While most households chose their homes for other reasons than water self-sufficiency, most respondents valued being self-sufficient in water despite certain challenges in running out of water occasionally, and maintaining their infrastructure. The survey results will assist water managers with options for diversifying sources of domestic water.

The threats of climate change to coasts present many adaptation challenges. Local governments aim to plan responsibly while navigating constituents’ concerns and constrained funds. Because residents and visitors alike are attracted to coastal environments, climate-induced damage to coastal resources has economic consequences in the locations most affected. John Rolfe, Helen Scarborough, Boyd Blackwell, Steve Blackley and Christine Walker test a methodology for assessing willingness to pay for protection and adaptation measures for camping grounds and beaches. In their set of Victorian sites, residents assigned higher value to beach protection, while visitors focused on campgrounds. Proximity to Melbourne also affected visitors’ willingness to pay. The method and results provide government agencies and other coastal managers with important information for making coastal management investments.

Editors’ tip: conclude with the implications for the journal’s readership

All journals have specific scopes, often to serve particular sets of users. You can improve the relevance of your work, and help a journal and its readers, by focusing your conclusions on the implications for that readership. Of course, you should tell readers what you found out, but remember to tell readers why that is meaningful for their research or practice. For this journal, emphasise implications for environmental management or policy.