Managing and reversing the decline in funding for on-farm R&D

Abstract

When considering the issue of managing and reversing the decline in funding for on-farm R&D, the first question to consider is how much has on-farm R&D declined and over what time period – and are we also talking extension services? Unfortunately this first question is not easily answered as data at the appropriate scale (beef, on-farm, northern Australia) and over an appropriate time period is not easily accessed.
The best published data comes from ABARES (Millist et al. 2017) where they reported national rural expenditure for both extension (2005-2015) and R&D (2006-2015). What this report documented is that total national rural R&D expenditure has been increasing, extension expenditure has been generally stagnant, and that the private sector has been the main driver behind the increase in R&D expenditure (Fig. 1). What has declined is the funding by State and Territory governments for R&D.