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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 60(11)

Re-inventing model-based decision support with Australian dryland farmers. 1. Changing intervention concepts during 17 years of action research

R. L. McCown A D , P. S. Carberry A , Z. Hochman B , N. P. Dalgliesh A and M. A. Foale C
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Agricultural Production Systems Research Unit (APSRU), PO Box 103, Toowoomba, Qld 4350, Australia.

B CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Agricultural Production Systems Research Unit (APSRU), 306 Carmody Road, St Lucia, Qld 4067, Australia.

C School of Land, Crops and Food Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld 4067, Australia.

D Corresponding author. Email: bob.mccown@csiro.au

Crop and Pasture Science 60(11) 1017-1030 https://doi.org/10.1071/CP08455
Submitted: 17 December 2008  Accepted: 13 July 2009   Published: 19 October 2009

Abstract

The idea that simulation models of agricultural production can serve as tools for farmers remains a compelling idea even after 3 decades of mostly disappointing development efforts. This paper is the first in a series that reports on 17 years of systems research that used models differently from the Decision Support System idea that has dominated the field. The starting point of FARMSCAPE (Farmers’, Advisers’, Researchers’, Monitoring, Simulation, Communication And Performance Evaluation) was finding whether farmers could value simulation when conditions for appreciation were improved by (a) specifying the simulator for individual paddocks in question and (b) delivering customised simulation to decision makers as a supporting service rather than software as a decision support product. The first aim of the program has been to learn how to effectively intervene in farm management practice using complex, abstract models of croplands, specified with local soil, climate, and management data. The second aim has been to learn how a resulting service that farmers value can be delivered cost effectively by a third party.

This first paper deals with an aspect of the first aim, i.e. valued decision support intervention. In the terms used by Checkland (1981), the activities that served this systems practice aim were guided by ‘what we thought we were doing’ in intervening in farmers’ practice, i.e. our systems thinking. This first paper concerns FARMSCAPE systems thinking and how it evolved over 17 years as we learned successively through discovery of a new concept or representation in the literature to overcome limitations of the then-current conceptual framework. Subsequent papers deal with customising scientific monitoring and simulation for farmers, communication as engagement in situations of practice, understanding decision support intervention as facilitation of personal knowledge construction, and piloting commercial delivery of a simulation-based service to farmers and their advisers.

Additional keywords: simulation, soft systems, participatory research, implementation, APSIM, FARMSCAPE, Yield Prophet.


Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the financial support over 17 years from many Australian funders, particularly the Grains Research & Development Corporation, Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, and Land and Water Australia’s Managing Climate Variability Program. We gratefully acknowledge the enthusiastic participation and substantial contributions of many farmers, extension advisers, and agribusiness consultants. The Birchip Cropping Group is our current partner in developing and delivering Yield Prophet and better collaborators cannot be imagined.


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1We later learned that agricultural economists had applied OR’s economic optimising models to farming well before 1950 (Case and Williams 1957; McCown et al. 2006) and that even the idea of the dynamic simulation model was imported from OR in the 1950s by agricultural scientists working on time-dependent processes of environment and production (interview with C. T. deWit; McCown 2002a, p. 13).

2When a statement of belief, not fully substantiated as a true fact, survives critical discussion, (philosophically) it achieves some of the (epistemic) status of a fact.

3As people develop ways of conceptualizing and acting toward the world, they begin organizing their lives around those particular themes and practices. These ‘life-worlds’, ‘ways of life’, ‘social worlds’, and the like, are important since they entail the stocks of knowledge, frames of reference, and senses of direction that the people constituting this and that community take into account in developing their lines of action (Prus 1996, p. 248).

4Notable exceptions in Australia were the efforts of HowWet developers to link water balance to field infiltration measurements (Hamilton 1998) and the use of grain yield and protein as a bioassay for N status in WHEATMAN (Woodruff 1992).