I’ve spent the better part of eight years conducting field trials on cover crops, soil chemistry, and vineyard management, publishing reports for Wine Australia and Hort Innovation. Some of it gained visibility — my cover crop webinar ended up as the most-viewed on AWRI’s YouTube channel — but I have no real mechanism to know whether growers actually adopted any of it.

That’s not just my problem. Australia invests over $3 billion annually in agricultural R&D, but the “state extension” infrastructure that historically transferred research to farmers has been in decline for two decades. Reports get published, PDFs get filed, and funding organisations struggle to demonstrate actual impact without infrastructure to monitor whether research reaches the people it’s meant to help.

Joe and I are building something to address this gap. More soon.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn.