The missing link in agtech adoption, with Pip Job

0:02Pip Job: Hello and welcome to Ag Tech So What? Brought to you by Tenacious Ventures. I'm Sarah Nolet. Ag research systems spend a lot of money globally to create and explore new ideas. In Australia, it's about$3 billion a year. But what does it actually take to turn those ideas into change?

0:20Sarah Nolet: There's a terrible assumption that just because someone adopts something that they continue to adopt that. This adoption needs to be understood and what motivates and drives this adoption of things.

0:32Pip Job: So in this episode, we interrogate every point along the adoption journey with Pip Jobe, a farmer, ag researcher, and extension expert who has looked closely at the systems behind agricultural adoption and extension. Pip has worked across land care, government, drought resilience, and in the startup world at Loan Bio. Her argument is that we may be thinking about extension all wrong. It's not simply about getting information in front of farmers. It's about understanding the motivations, capabilities, behaviors, and social context behind whether someone actually changes what they do, and then designing programs around that.

1:06Pip Job: So what does that mean for ag tech? If we're serious about getting new technology into farmers' hands, perhaps we need to spend less time asking how do we reach more farmers and more time asking what actually makes change stick. Let's meet Pip.

1:21Sarah Nolet: So, well, we have a smaller farm now, and we run at the moment just sheep and it's a grazing operation. My roots were in the cattle industry growing up as a kid and for a big proportion of my adult life. Yeah, so it's kind of slowing down a little bit stage of life now. So you don't need all that comes with a big farm, that's for sure. 50 years of my life has, or near 50 years, has been always on a farm and then my professional career has been in ag.

1:51Pip Job: And so in those kind of in ag, but not on a farm role, tell me about some of those.

1:56Sarah Nolet: Yeah. So the earliest stage of my career was with land care. So I started with our local land care group where I was living, the Little River Land Care Catchment. I was their first sort of paid employee initially, and they'd received a rather large grant and needed staffing. So my first job was saying, can you help us be administratively ready to actually employ people and deliver a big scale project. And I just moved through that organisation. I was with them for nearly 15 years, started in that role, and I ended up in the CEO role. And that was an organisation that sort of grew exponentially and really specialised in multi-million dollar projects, working directly with a farmer membership base of 680 farming businesses and about a 72 % engagement rate across that membership.

2:46Sarah Nolet: So I learned a lot at that time about working with farmers and the challenges that come with adoption in an everyday applied way.

2:56Pip Job: Like for those maybe not familiar, what is Landcare and what's the business model of Landcare?

3:03Sarah Nolet: Landcare is a not-for-profit model. It's been around for over 30 years and it was like a beautiful amalgamation of bringing together agriculture alongside the concept of natural resource management, so caring for land beyond just agricultural productivity. And Bob Hawke, during his time as Prime Minister, was a huge champion for land care and seeing it get off the ground and well supported. So land care groups popped up driven by local need and local interest. So truly organic in every sense. And today land care looks different all across the nation. So land care can be sustainable ag orientated groups.

3:48Sarah Nolet: It can be bush care groups. It can be coast care groups.

3:51Pip Job: So you were there a number of years and then some time in government as well.

3:56Sarah Nolet: So when I won the National Rural Women's Award, I had an opportunity to progress the project that I was doing as part of my award, which was looking at the social barriers to progress that inhibit farming family businesses from achieving the results that they want to achieve. An opportunity came up for me to join the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries to continue that work. I had nearly 10 years with New South Wales DPI, doing education programs into the area of resilience and leading resilience orientated programs. Over that period, I had lots of different experiences, whether it was programs that were trying to drive behaviour or practice change with the farming sector.

4:35Sarah Nolet: I also led programs that did natural disaster recovery. I sort of had roles, including the state drought coordinator in 2018. We co-led our COVID response for primary industries during that memorable time.

4:49Pip Job: You also had a stint in the whole other end of the scale and private sector venture-backed startup at Loam. How did that come about?

4:57Sarah Nolet: I love deep learning and I love being vulnerable and having a good challenge. So after nearly 10 years of the department, I was ready to go and do something different. So yeah, I went and joined Loan Bio in the soil carbon project world. I was managing their carbon projects for the second crop program. That was a huge insight into something so different into the venture capitalist world and what that means in the operating context of a private company. I was only with LAME for a year and learned a lot about that compliance environment that they're operating in, but also the commercial sector that comes with the products that they have on offer.

5:34Sarah Nolet: I left LAME and I joined the Southern New South Wales Drought Resiliency Innovation Hub, which is part of Charles Sturt University. So back to very much that interface of extension and adoption again. Well, I've done two roles with them. I did some contract work, which is on the Pathways to Impact framework and looking in alternative investment models that would drive a better adoption outcome for Australian agriculture and then knowledge brokering as well. And about to head off on a different venture again, about to head back into government to join the Natural Resources Commission.

6:07Pip Job: Oh, congrats. I wasn't sure if you'd be able to say what was next.

6:10Sarah Nolet: So don't ask me what I'll be doing because I can't talk about that bit.

6:13Pip Job: OK, I won't. OK, perfect. Perfect. On that kind of private sector experience with a startup and venture, what's an example where you were like, okay, I'm not in Kansas anymore. This is really different. Anything that comes to mind?

6:23Sarah Nolet: Oh, look, if I think back across my career, when I was with Landcare and having to report to a board as CEO, you're managing tight to a P &L. You've got to have that vision of where you're heading and what's the strategy that you're putting in place to achieve that. Every cent matters, especially in an NGO environment. Then moving across into government, like a whole different scale of financial accountability, you are constantly checking yourself, like this is public money. How are we spending every dollar in an accountable, sensible way and achieves the impact that we're setting out to get? Then you move across, like for me, moving across into a private company where it's VC orientated, all of a sudden there's different terminology.

7:07Sarah Nolet: You talk about financial runways and certain series, depending where people are up to, series B or C, and what that means and how does all the information inside the business feed into a narrative that supports further investment. And now I'm sort of operating in a university environment where it's lower key and we're reporting back into the federal government. So it's just such different operating contexts. I've learned a lot from every single one of those. They're all different, but they're all right for their own reasons.

7:40Pip Job: Yeah, super interesting. I actually didn't know that you were at LOM until I was doing research for this episode. So it kind of adds another layer on like the breadth of experience you have in extension. And we can talk a little bit about startups as an effective path to get technology in the hands of farmers or not and kind of what you think.

7:57Sarah Nolet: Like extension was a word bandied around. But to me, this confusion between extension and sales, the two very, very different things. It's so important to understand like your customer comes through many different doors and it doesn't matter whether you're land care, government, you know, in the startup world or scale up world, you really need to take that time to understand the differences, the different motivators, the different capabilities that exist in your customer base. And you have to match the strategies that you're using, like the levers that you're pulling to engage with those, especially on something as complicated as carbon projects, right?

8:35Sarah Nolet: They are really complicated things. There's a lot of decisions that need to be made. So there's quite a different extension piece that sits behind something like a carbon project versus just say the Young Farmer Business Program and helping people become better business people. They're very different. And so the broad observation that I see across all the different areas that I operate in is this default to, well, a workshop will fix that, but not understanding behind that, what are the motivation, the capabilities, the behaviours, the social norms, like all the things that might sit behind that and then going strategically, this is what we're going to do to address that.

9:18Sarah Nolet: Yeah, it was an interesting, I was probably expecting coming into the startup world to hear a lot more, we'll see a lot more rigour around extension, but yeah, I saw more of a confusion of it as sales.

9:31Pip Job: What do you see as the difference there between extension and sales?

9:35Sarah Nolet: Well, extension's about an uplift in like it's either knowledge, capability, confidence, so that people make a decision to actually make a change in practice over time. And sometimes they are very slow burns. I've always loved the saying, you know, that you can have one 100 % change or you can have 101 % changes. You still get the same result, just the time factor may differ, right? And we know based on people's risk appetites, like some people love to eat risk in its whole. Some people like, nah, brother, just peel the layers off that onion. Thank you. And they're the things that we have to factor in when we think about extension.

10:12Sarah Nolet: The challenge with a sales mentality is that you're trying to go in and force someone into something quite quickly. That's my observation around sales. And you think about it whenever we experience that, you go to a car yard, it feels like a hard sale from the minute you walk in the car yard or a shop dress or whatever it is. And so it's reacting to the need that we need sales because that's part of our financial pipeline or whatever it might be versus we want to shift knowledge, behavior, capabilities in a set cohort of people for this impact reason.

10:49Pip Job: Interesting. I can see how they are different. And especially if you think of sales as like the used car salesman or snake oil set, like it's really partial, like you will buy my thing and my thing is the best thing. And it's not a good thing for you unless it's mine versus like a kind of want to help you go on the journey that you want to go on. And I'm actually trying to uncover what's best for you. And if that happens to lead to something that fits my product or my service, then great. But if not, it doesn't. And I could put that in a sales category very much too, but I would also, I guess my thought is that that overlaps a lot more with extension.

11:21Pip Job: Would that be fair from your perspective? Or is because there's something commercial, does that sort of negate it from being extension from your perspective?

11:29Sarah Nolet: Yeah, I think what you've said is very fair. And just to add to that is I think sales is, it's a transaction where I think extension is far more about transformation. It's not, The most successful extension programs I've seen are very focused on the overall transformation of the system and the relationship building that exists across the players. Sales is a one-way transaction.

11:58Pip Job: And again, like I sound like I've got a big horse in this race. I'm more just kind of teasing it apart because I haven't really thought of this. Like I would have, again, thought that the best sales, especially in agriculture, and especially if you're selling a product that is transformational from a practice change perspective, you're going to want to approach it that way about like it's consultative and it's relationship based. And it's also that degree of kind of impartial, like people are going on their own journey. And it is about the system because you've got to get upstream and downstream.

12:29Pip Job: And so it could still have that. And like, I guess what's a good example? I don't know if you work for RCS or something and you're selling grazing for profit courses and you're still a business selling a service or a product, but you're also in the business of transformation.

12:47Sarah Nolet: Yeah. That's a really great example. Like RCS is a cracking example, right? Of where they have blended those two things really well together. And I would describe them as extension professionals. Yeah. Well and truly. Yeah, right. And I think it's a great point, Sarah, because there's probably, you could point to a whole heap of companies out there that do those things really well in terms of that relationship that's built and acknowledging that over time, the customer that you're dealing with is going to evolve. And it's the relationship over time that comes with the sales piece, which I think is really important.

13:23Sarah Nolet: And so like if you're dealing with a farming business over a really long period of time, without doubt in that time, you're going to see hardship. You could see births, deaths and marriages. You could see endless things, right? And so how you evolve in that relationship with your customers is really important. The good businesses do that stuff really well. That's why they're around for a long time. Yeah. And they have such great client relationships because they invest in more than just the transaction.

13:50Pip Job: Yeah, got it. Okay. And especially I take your point about the kinds of pressure that a company could be under to show monthly or quarterly or annual sales improvements to justify a new funding round when then you're kind of putting pressure on people to change faster than they might be ready to do that, which isn't going to work particularly well over the long run.

14:09Sarah Nolet: And I think the same can be said when you have less than ideal sales. We know that there's a lot of less than ideal extension too out there. So I'm not saying one's better than the other. There's just this massive uplift potential that we have, which is kind of that work that I was doing earlier last year is how do we actually leverage the resources, the investment, the capability to actually get greater uplift and adoption in the ag sector?

14:35Pip Job: So what do you think is the biggest disconnect? Because you've done, I mean, Australia invests billions in ag research every year, it's almost$3 billion. And some of that research doesn't work, like the science never panned out. Some of it is in consulting or meta things. but even if you called it 2 billion, that's a lot of money and not a lot of it achieves widespread adoption and some of it does. What do you think the biggest disconnect is? Yeah.

14:58Sarah Nolet: So I had five months last year doing a deep dive into exactly that topic. So I focused on the last 10 years worth of reports, inquiries, anything I can get my hand on that related to extension adoption and had a look at what are the trends that have been coming through. like it's already widely known that we're not getting the adoption uptake from that significant investment and there was a couple of buckets that kind of fell out.

15:24Pip Job: Do you think it is widely known because I would say I'm in a lot of conversations where you're on either side of the coin so I guess just to unpack that point for a second is it sort of well known that adoption doesn't happen or maybe it's sort of qualified somehow?

15:39Sarah Nolet: Yeah look I think I'd probably say that there's pockets where there is good adoption and people would probably say it's going well. But I think probably more of the conversations I'm in is that the adoption rate isn't what it could be. There's missed opportunity. Yeah. So there's a couple of buckets that sit there. One is around that we are using outdated extension approaches. So there was a massive investments sort of through the 80s and 90s into extension. And then it was left to the industry, just continue that. And that's kind of where we've stayed. And there hasn't been that ongoing investment into extension, the capability across the industry.

16:22Sarah Nolet: And so it's become far more organic in terms of the pockets where it's been done well and where capability and skill building is occurring. And we know that extension has been eroded heavily out of our government departments,

16:36Pip Job: etc so that was one theme how would you characterize that model from the 80s and 90s that

16:42Sarah Nolet: is no longer serving us so so like it was all based on the best practice available at that time and what was done in australian agriculture was pretty groundbreaking you know for australia and world-leading as well the gatton institute sort of that extension institute that was set up in Gatton, that was a really profound turning point for Australian agriculture and the extension expertise that sits out there in the industry. And that's what leads to the second bucket is we actually now have a succession problem because those people that went through that era are all now getting closer to the stage of retirement and who's coming up behind them as those real professionals in the field of extension.

17:29Sarah Nolet: And so they were two important buckets. The other one was around...

17:34Pip Job: And again, just to unpack that Gatton model, how would you, for anyone not familiar, how would you characterize what that sort of taught or what that was based on?

17:41Sarah Nolet: So there was an institute set up specifically inside Gatton University that was dedicated solely to extension practice in agriculture. And that was the hub for anyone that was working with farmers in the ag sector to go and do training and really upskill in extension skills. It was a hallmark for Australian agriculture, that is for sure.

18:06Pip Job: Was there like a school of thought that it touted that was revolutionary at the time or leading at the time? Or was it more just the fact that anyone was getting trained to do this versus it getting slapped on at the end of a project that made it special?

18:17Sarah Nolet: What made it special was that workplaces, whether that was government agencies or private companies, saw the importance of investing in putting their staff through the different programs that were available through Gatton and through that institute. But just that mass movement of people at the interface of working with farmers, upskilling, having a shared common agenda about how do you support farmers in new ways, new methods, was really important at that time.

18:52Pip Job: Got it. It's almost like you're saying the thing that was different then was that this was a thing that was important and should be resourced, like that it is a specialist skill and that we need to train people in doing it as opposed to you can just do it because you're a researcher or a tech startup or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's kind of two buckets you found.

19:09Sarah Nolet: The third was around the investment model. So we actually have a broker investment model that prioritizes more investment in the R &D end and less in the extension adoption. and with that also comes like the fact that extension often gets tacked on to the end of projects that's not designed from the very beginning and whether that is like a research project even considering how does this apply to an end user or even if there'd be programs that are being designed extension is the unforgotten friend that's actually really important at the other end. Yeah.

19:48Pip Job: When you think about extension and when you're talking about in the Australian ag context, are you mostly talking about defunded, like RD &E, research development and extension, or would you put government or like what landscape? Are we talking corporate research and how that gets extended? All of it. Okay.

20:02Sarah Nolet: All of it. Yeah. All of the whole picture. You know, I think anyone that's investing any money in something that is to create practice or behavior change in agriculture. It's a pretty widespread challenge. There's pockets of really great work, but more broadly, there's this lost opportunity to really leverage from those that are doing stuff and doing it well, and just re-looking at the system and saying, how do we redesign?

20:30Pip Job: What are other incentives that are driving the behaviour we're currently getting, where it's much more focused on research than it is on extension?

20:38Sarah Nolet: Look, I think the innovation space drives towards that real focus on research and development, which is really exciting and we need to, right? Because we've got modern challenges that we're facing and we can't use old practices of the past to try and tackle those. So I think that investment is sensible, but it's trying to think across the continuum, right? Like when you think that it's the R, it's the D, it's the E, it's the A, why do that research piece if you're not thinking about the actual adoption and uptake and the impact that it can potentially create. That's where the missed opportunity is.

21:12Sarah Nolet: I would never say that there's too much spent on R &D. I don't believe that at all. Like it's really important. We just, the weighting on how its investment needs to be reconsidered.

21:23Pip Job: Why do you think it is undervalued? Like what is it about, you know, one is, like you said before, the kind of flashiness or the newness factor research part of it? Yeah.

21:31Sarah Nolet: And that's, so that's with some of the really interesting stuff that I got to look at when I was doing this body of work was, look, what's going on in other sectors? What's happening in other parts of the world for agriculture that are actually shifting the dial? Interestingly, some of the most fascinating stuff I found was outside of agriculture. It was in the health sector, education sector, social services, Glade, about how they're doing things differently to really shift the dial. When you think about some of those sectors, they're dealing with really wicked problems. And you kind of think if they can help shift the dial on major health issues or social welfare issues, what can we learn in ag from those?

22:10Sarah Nolet: And so, you know, we know that behaviour science is a relatively new field of science. It wasn't around back in the era of Gatton days. So, you know, how have we kept up to speed with all of that new knowledge and brought those in. And like even the things that are done in the tech world, right? Like they do that sort of whole human centered design and customer journey mapping really well. Why aren't we doing that in ag? And then there's the field of implementation science, which is much newer. It's well embedded inside the health sector. So we need to be starting to look at these new sciences and what do we need to bring in so that we don't fall further behind the eight ball in our practice.

22:52Sarah Nolet: And I think the challenge we've got is it's really easy to go, we'll do all this R &D work and then we'll just run some workshops and somehow that equals adoption. And I often hear this major confusion between reach, like reach can mean absolutely nothing, right? And I just shared an example last week, a personal one, is very kindly from the government on my birthday, I received a bowel cancer screening kit. thank you to the Australian government, but it has sat next to my cupboard for quite some time now. So like, is that reach tick? Yes, it reached me, but I've done nothing with it. You could say, yes, we've reached one citizen of Australia.

23:37Sarah Nolet: Yeah, but until I actually do the test and send it off and deal with the results, whichever way they might be, like that's the impact when you get to that end. And the interesting thing about this as an example is thinking about why haven't I done the test, right? And I think about it and I go, well, I know that bowel cancer is one of the leading cancers in Australia. I watched a documentary that said that I'm the prime, like I'm known as the cancer generation for Australia. My dad's undergoing cancer treatment at the moment. So I've seen the worst of what treatment does to you. So why haven't I done the bloody test, right?

24:17Sarah Nolet: And so when you actually think about it and break that down, there's these barriers to adoption that we need to understand and sit behind people. So when I thought about my example, this is only just the other day, I was like, okay, so there's an ickiness to it that you kind of go, too sure about. So there's a motivation challenge going on for me in there. Timing, I live out of town. What if I do it and I can't get it off in time? And there's this sort of timing thing going on in my head. So when you think about all of those three different things in this example is going, okay, well, what are the strategies that you might need to put behind each one of those so that you do shift the lever and actions taken, right?

24:58Sarah Nolet: I know that's like a wild example to use here and draw a correlation to agriculture, but that's my point is we've got to start thinking about all the little different motivators and the drivers that sit behind people and their adoption and actually tailor to those things rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach that may only suit the smallest percentage of your target audience.

25:24Pip Job: Well, I love that example and it makes it really concrete. You didn't expect that, did you? No, I did not expect that. I think our first bowel cancer premiere on Ag Tech So What, that's good. I think it's good.

25:34Sarah Nolet: I've actually started doing my tail. Good, good. It's the accountability piece because I think I said it to someone and I was like, I actually need to just actually take account now. I've confessed that I haven't been doing it. Yeah, so, you know, there's an entire business.

25:48Pip Job: The whole peer support and like you said something before though that I wanted to ask about implementation science. How is that different than behavioral science or how does that fit into this picture?

25:57Sarah Nolet: Okay, so behavioral science is about the person and how that person adopts change or resists change or reverts from change. Implementation is the system behind how you do a program. So it's end to end about the design, the delivery, how that change is sustained over time. So two different functions. One's about the person. One's about the system of how you deliver programs.

26:25Pip Job: I read a fascinating book recently called Change or Die. And it starts with all the research on how something literally as stark as you get a diagnosis for like a heart condition. And it's like, if you don't change your diet and exercise, like you will die like all the days and how people are compliant for like shockingly small amounts of time before they revert back to whatever it is they're doing. And that as a particular population where you would think that if it was literally you're going to die and the amount of bypass surgeries and double this and repeat this. And it's like, but you could just do the behavior change that would actually make you healthy.

27:01Pip Job: And then sort of unpacks, you know, how you'd overcome that and actually looks at like a prison population and recidivism. And it looks at like in a business context, sort of innovation and changing. But a lot of it is around, yeah, like how we're kind of doing it wrong in so many contexts.

27:15Sarah Nolet: Yeah, very much so. It's a really fascinating field and it can be uncomfortable. And a project that I've been doing work with recently, which is a GRDC funded program, like Riskwise Project, a really impactful project, really looking at risk reward decision making with farmers. And it's been interesting around the groups that are rolling out the project. A lot of them are used to sort of agronomic technical delivery. when you ask them to shift into what they see as social sciences that's not their comfort zone there's a bit of a resistance there to think about like how do I embrace this and deliver it and you think about all the fears that come with that like what if they're presenting to some content that they're kind of having to read off script or less familiar with what if someone asks me a question and I can't answer it and usually I'm the technical expert that can answer every single question.

28:09Sarah Nolet: So it's not a comfortable place for people to be launched into cold. It is a whole field that we really need to start. Let's bring that back where it is about really giving people an immersion into these new sciences so that they are comfortable and they embed it into everything that they're doing.

28:27Pip Job: One hypothesis I have that I want to test with you is the reason, especially from an RDC perspective, that extensions may be undervalued is because it's harder to kind of get the money out the door faster. And there is a lot of pressure on having the impact. And so therefore spending the money is correlated to having impact, whereas the practice change can take a while. And so it's sort of, I guess that's where I get to with some of the like, what are the incentives that drive the system to undervalue extension? And that's one for me that it's slower and less tangible in some ways. And so it doesn't get its share of funding?

29:04Sarah Nolet: Yeah, like the monitoring and evaluation of behaviour change, it requires like an added investment that often in a tight budget environment, especially when you think about like government funding programs will often do a cap on like monitoring, evaluation, reporting could be like 10%, 12%. Yeah. So you start to put restrictions around what you can afford to do, even though sometimes there might be ambitious goals in programs. But, you know, so you do have to pay more for that because it's a specialist skillset that we actually don't have broadly. And whenever I speak to organisations about how do you measure behavioural change, they find it difficult and complicated.

29:46Sarah Nolet: And also, you know, if it is a multi-million dollar large scale project, the things that you measure versus a$10 ,000 project, right? Like it's, how do you have the right level of metrics that support that type of investment and the scale of projects? That's one challenge. The other is, as you rightly say, change is slow. And when investors talk about, oh, this is a long-term program, it's three or five years, that's not... Most people are just starting to be able to wrap their head around awareness in a period of time like that. So we don't seem to take a longitudinal approach to how do we actually really understand the scale of impact.

30:24Sarah Nolet: And there's a terrible assumption that just because someone adopts something that they continue to adopt that. Disadoption needs to be understood and what motivates and drives disadoption of things. And I had an experience earlier in my career where I was working alongside a farming family who were, I was just in a support role and they were putting exponential changes in place. They were paying a lot of money to be part of a really good and well-regarded program. They were probably about five or six years into that and achieving great things. But it was a three-generation business. The middle generation was evident that there was a mental health challenge sitting there.

31:06Sarah Nolet: That person became suicidal and was hospitalized for an extended period of time. And everything that they'd put in place in that business, all the change, it changed overnight and they reverted back to past practice. So it's always stuck with me about the concept of sustained change. It's hard, right? Like life is challenging. And when we get thrown hard things, like it's really easy to divert back to where our comfort zone is. And like, how do you support sustained change? Like that's where we need to be looking at because I don't think we fully understand disadoption drivers and we certainly don't design for that over the long haul.

31:47Sarah Nolet: I'd love to see programs that are really looking at 10 years plus and thinking about how do you sustain the mechanism that comes from this because so many projects end and that's it, that's the full stop and you know what do you do with that like the legacy items or how do you hand that great initiative into the next level of organization that can scale it out.

32:10Pip Job: It's interesting. I want to ask who's doing this well or what are examples, whether it's an ag or not. Great if you have ag ones. And the first one that I wondered about was what you said before, about how much of the startup literature, like if you get trained on entrepreneurialism and how to build a startup, like so much of it is what's the value proposition? What are the behavioral drivers? Pain versus gain. And like, what's the system in which they operate? Like it sounds so familiar. So it kind of comes full circle. It's interesting that it would seem like startups would be better at that, at least through the kind of academic literature of how to start a startup.

32:41Pip Job: But anyways, you don't have big startups. What are good examples of people doing this well in or outside of ag?

32:46Sarah Nolet: Look, I've got a real admiration for some of the work that's being done in the health sector. Some of the stuff I saw coming out of Scotland, health sector was really impressive and it's become embedded just as a culture piece. And same with like really admired the work being done by the Centre for Implementation in Canada, again, focusing on the health industry there. They're really admirable pieces of work that are actually creating a culture shift in the way that things are being done. As I said, really wicked health issues to try and tackle. In terms of agriculture, we have some brilliant examples.

33:21Sarah Nolet: There are some truly effective organisations that are out there. You have a look at the tremendous work that's done by River Ream Plains Farming Systems Group in southern New South Wales and northern Victoria. Those guys do their design piece really well. They think about their members, like what's their needs, how do they design their programs sort of in an adaptive way. I went to the Australasia Pacific Extension Network Conference in Brisbane last year, talk about a powerhouse of projects that are really impactful and happening all across the nation in all sorts of different sectors. Some of them are government agency run.

34:00Sarah Nolet: Some of them are private consultants. Some of them are land care groups. There was a really rich diversity. Some of them are RDC programs. We just don't seem to have a thread between sharing those learnings. So that real knowledge management piece and how do you extend that out so that everyone can be the beneficiary of the stuff that works well and let's not keep reinventing the wheel. Yeah, totally.

34:24Pip Job: So let's talk about the investment side, because that's obviously the stuff needs to be funded. And you've proposed or thought quite a lot about different models for that.

34:32Sarah Nolet: Yeah. So with the work I was doing with the Southern New South Wales Hub, we had a look at if there was to be like an ideal environment for an investment model that really did leverage the extension and adoption end better, but not disregarding the research and development component. component so we kind of really had a look at at the moment we are in a short-termism investment cycle and as I said before like three five years that's not actually long term it's quite short short term in the context of behavioral change they're based on like most programs are based on like there is control and power in there around you know these are the targets that we have these are the objectives you must deliver to these.

35:16Pip Job: I think a good example there that I see a lot is the volume. They're like, we couldn't fund your application because it's not going to reach 600 people. And it's like, but of those 600, 592 of them are not going to change. Whereas like going really deep with eight might deliver far more impact. And that would be a lot of attention. Yeah.

35:35Sarah Nolet: Yeah. A hundred percent. We get drawn into output metrics all the time, right? And even when programs say we're focused on impact or outcomes, I can guarantee you those contracts will be output orientated. And that becomes the really big frustration point to that. I've done a lot of facilitation in my days and I loved a group that was no more than 15 to 20 because that group you'll have far more shift than a room full of 60 to 100. But what does everyone love? They love that, oh, 100 people came. like so what we're back to the reach example with the bow screening kit right so we have these challenges inside like the contracting environment and that control of milestones which milestone orientated that have very set targets it reduces like that process of continuous learning as i said before like stopping and doing that process of plan do study act to understand where might we be going off track?

36:40Sarah Nolet: What should we stop doing? What do you start doing? So that by the end of that investment, you've actually achieved the outcome or that impact that you're setting out to achieve. So many people end up going, just the effort of going through a variation to a contract is exponential. And in some cases, it's not allowed. That stifles in-program, let's call it innovation. That's kind of the space that needs to happen and that real iteration to go we're not getting where we need to. What have we got to change? They're the missed opportunities in the current funding environment. And there's fragmented investments as well, right?

37:19Sarah Nolet: Like with so many great programs where if there was another grant that ran past that, that was about how do you scale this out now? It was really stoked to see the Future Drought Fund rolled out by the feds late last year. They invited a whole range of programs into a scaling grant round. We need more of that? How do you take the good stuff that's happening and scale it, whether that means in area or numbers of target people or whatever it might need to look like? We need more of that type of vision, but it needs to be commonly known. I think when people know that there's a pathway here to be able to scale a concept out over time, I think they'll design quite differently rather than a one-off program.

38:02Sarah Nolet: And then towards the end of that delivery period, you get told, actually we're going to do a scaling round. It shortens the vision that people can have for what's possible over a much longer period of time.

38:12Pip Job: Yeah. And so that's some of the challenges and you've proposed like a wholly different model. So talk about that. Yeah.

38:19Sarah Nolet: So the model kind of shifts towards like a mission style, like an orientation of thinking. So how do you bring all the interested parties together, whether they've got cash, stuff, resources, assets, whatever the pool needs to look like into a central bowl. And all of the people sitting around that bowl have an equal power in determining what are we setting out to achieve? What will the important checkpoints be a long time that keeps us, that we know progress is heading in the right direction. We co-design together with the target audience as part of that when I was talking about co-design. We co-design what it is that we're doing, how we're doing it, the points that we measure.

39:03Sarah Nolet: You agree on what will we evaluate at the end or throughout so that at the end you actually can prove whatever it is that you're setting out to achieve. So you disperse the control and it's not necessarily all about a particular organisation's set strategic plan objectives, that it's about the impact that can be created on a shared mission. So it might be saying, okay, we all share a mission here around climate change and the need for our industry to adopt practices at a much more exponential rate. So we had that shared mission. So it's not about one organisation, you know, and that's my power.

39:41Sarah Nolet: That's the control I'm going to hold on the purse strings. So there's a lot more ownership across everyone involved who've got all the resources to put on the table about how might we actually go about achieving what we need to. As I said, the important thing in there is around agreed checkpoints that you come back together to understand, are we on track or off track? Rather than it being around these really tight reporting milestones that cripple adaptation of a project as it's going along its course.

40:11Pip Job: You almost want the measure of success in the early days to be rate of learning as opposed to some kind of rate of outcome, right? Which, again, the parallels to the startup world are really strong there. Like we talk about that in terms of founders, like they're getting stuff wrong or they don't, they haven't figured out the business model or the technology doesn't work, but they're iterating fast enough that we have confidence they'll get there.

40:31Sarah Nolet: Like that's a good leading indicator. It's their longitudinal, right? Because you might be looking at like, are they 10 plus 10 plus 10 cycles that you're looking at? Not, not two or three or five. Yeah. Fascinating. But it takes a lot of courage to actually look at doing things differently, right? We're working in a very fast-paced, rapid-fire world at the moment and everyone seems to be uncomfortable just to slow it down for a minute and really think about how might we be able to do this in a different way, have the courage to do that. We've certainly had a couple of conversations with different organisations about this model and, yeah, like there's people, there's interest, but there's a, well, can you go and do it somewhere else and if it works then come back and see us?

41:12Sarah Nolet: And, you know, like it's this courage to step out and go, we're actually not achieving the rate of change we need to. Let's think about how we could do this differently. Like Einstein said it, you know, you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Yeah. Insanity.

41:30Pip Job: Yeah. When you talk about co-design and especially with any end user, it's nothing about farmers specifically, but there's an element of asking people what they want in here and they want a faster horse, as opposed to like that they could see a car and, you know, that famous saying. What's your take on that from a co-design perspective of you can say, you know, what thing do you want to solve this problem? Oh, I just want it this way. And maybe that's actually not how it's going to be delivered.

41:54Sarah Nolet: Look, I think I'll answer that from the experiences I've had around my drought coordinator role, right, when going out and engaging with community. But there was limiting factors. I got lots of requests for faster racehorses, but that wasn't a possibility, right? So I think whatever context we're operating in, you've got to know what your limiting boundaries actually are. And in co-design, there is a lovely piece there where you can go out, right? And it's how do you expand out with the idea and then go, okay, well, in these parameters, how might we actually carve it back in, right? And the key in there is about where you land back on consensus.

42:34Sarah Nolet: And that's the power behind co-design is allowing that process to go out, bring it back in, and then you keep that. One of the biggest challenges I see is people do co-design at the very beginning of something, and that's where it stops. Co-design should exist all the way through. And I'd love to think that there is never an end, right? But it should constantly continue. And as you're going through programs and you do that true co-design process, that will continue to occur. It'll go out, and then it will come back in. And it will always land back at the right place if you have all the right functions around it.

43:08Sarah Nolet: Yeah.

43:09Pip Job: Okay, if you were advising Australia's ag innovation ecosystem, you're queen for a day and you can wave one wand to make the most impact on adoption and extension over the next decade. I'll give you 10 years, not three to five. You can have 10. Thank you. What would you change?

43:24Sarah Nolet: I think invest in the education and development of the people that you've got doing that work with the grassroots audience. audience. Really go and invest in it. And in the new sciences, like go and invest in behaviour and implementation science, learning and development. I think it'll pay dividends. And the same thing, it'll take a while for your people because that's behaviour change as well, and they have to learn it and adopt it. So that longer term view of the training and development of your people.

43:54Pip Job: Like most of our guests, I could have talked to Pip for many more hours. Despite all the money spent in Ag, our D &E, there's just so much we can be doing better. So my first takeaway from PIP is that adoption isn't the last stage of a project. It is the product. PIP defines extension as building the knowledge, capability, and confidence that let a farmer make a change and sustain it. Not just hearing about something or even buying it. For AgTech, that means the technology is only part of what companies offer. The relationship and the process around it, the business model, are just as, if not even more, important.

44:29Pip Job: And just like an ag tech, designing for those considerations from the beginning can save a lot of waste and drive more impact. Second, Pip spoke about how ag can draw on the best practices of behavioral science, implementation science, and human-centered design. Right now, sometimes we assume a workshop or a fact sheet will lead to adoption, and that's often a dead end. What I find interesting is that these approaches start with the person. What motivates them? What gets in the way? What might cause them to change? And actually, that's exactly what startup methodologies advocate, too. Get out of the building and talk to customers.

45:02Pip Job: Really understand those personas. Yet researchers and tech companies alike often design more for the funder or the investor than for the farmer who has to fit the technology into an existing business. In research land, even though impact would be possible to measure, most of what funders count is actually their spend, the dollars out the door. Pip's health screening kit reached her and nothing happened. Change didn't occur. Research often takes the box, but it alone isn't actually change in the system. And funnily enough, startups know this trap too. A founder can quote user numbers, but do those users stay?

45:37Pip Job: And is anyone actually getting value? Is there even a business? Ag R &D is no different maybe when it comes to dollars out and people reached. And we see this a ton in our advisory work. It's why we focus on helping organizations measure what their R &D investment actually delivers. Finally, the highest leverage move Pip advocates for the system may actually be about people. When she was asked what she'd change over a decade, Pip didn't pick a program. She said to invest in training everyone who works with farmers. So that's it for another episode of Ag Tech So What? Thank you again to our guest, Pip Jobe, and thank you for listening.

46:10Pip Job: Make sure you please hit follow so you automatically get these episodes and so others can find the show. For any more information, please visit our website, tenacious.ventures. or check out the show notes. I'm Sarah Nolette. I'll catch you next time.