Project details
Status: Completed
At a glance
- Agriculture and food processing are becoming increasingly knowledge intensive.
- This project developed a mechanism for small and medium sized businesses in North West Tasmanian to navigate the depth of knowledge they need to begin to become sustainable in the face of rapid changes, particularly in climate and technology.
- The Agri-food Knowledge Matrix has been developed to provide a snapshot of the people, organisations and enterprises that provide information, support, or resources relating to innovation.
What is the problem?
Family farms and local agri-food enterprises support North West Tasmania’s economic and community sustainability. New technologies can drought-proof agricultural industries and boost community resilience through diversification, post-farm-gate value adding and improved environmental stewardship.
Yet local producers without large professional staff or research and development budgets are disadvantaged in understanding and taking advantage of fast-moving technological and other developments.
This project was the foundation for a regional agri-food knowledge cluster to link agri-food producers with knowledge holders from local service providers to online knowledge repositories.
The solution
To make sense of the vast and complex array of information and resources available to North West Tasmanian agrifood producers, an Agri-food Knowledge Matrix was created.
The matrix identifies and arranges knowledge holder entities according to areas of food production practice and stage of the innovation/change process for various agri-food business sectors.
These sectors include horticulture, dairy, livestock and wool, seafood and aquaculture, environment, forestry and wildlife, food processing, agritourism.
Some of the focus areas include production, technical, natural resource management (NRM) business, funding and banking, marketing, people workplace health and safety, people wellbeing, sustainability, and advocacy.
Industry engagement
A project advisory group was established with representatives of agri-food producer associations, regional development and natural resource management bodies and the Tas Farm Innovation Hub.
Outcomes
This project aimed to grow the self-reliance, productivity and profitability of the agricultural sector with drought resilience strategies and practices.
It focused on strengthening the wellbeing and social capital of rural, regional and remote agricultural-dependent communities by promoting community wellbeing.
By linking the economic, environmental and social objectives, we laid a foundation for developing a producer-friendly agri-food knowledge tool and to establish a regional agri-food knowledge cluster in North West Tasmania.
Related resources
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Acknowledgements:
We thank the project funding body the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Future Drought Fund IDEAS grant, 2022-2023.
The authors are grateful for the contribution of Professor Robyn Eversole, who was the original lead researcher of this project.