 My interest as a consultant and as a farmer and as a project manager for, as someone said, MLA and JADC in projects, is how farmers actually make the decision. We've heard a lot today about how technology is going to drive opportunities and how there are great opportunities out there and we need to innovate and we need to do these things. But really there's one aspect where the rubber hits the road and that's how people make decisions. And I don't reckon as part of the mix of understanding just what we have to do to get that innovation on farm and realise those opportunities is to understand about how farms actually make decisions. So that's the angle I'm going to actually come from. When I first started in consulting 30 years ago a very wise dairy consultant said to me, he said, the only real difference between the top 20% of producers and the rest is that they make good decisions at the right time. And so it's not about technology, technology is always going to be there, it's always going to be flowing in. It's how they grab that, it's how they process that and how they make the right decision at the right time. And so that's really sort of the focus. And when we think about it, I don't reckon many of us think about the decisions we make and how we make them because we're making them all the time. We make them all the time in farming, we make hundreds of them a day. But decision making is a skill, it can be taught and it can be learnt. And I reckon one of the areas that we need to focus on as well as worrying about innovation and a whole lot of other opportunities there is to start to skill farmers in that ability and advisers to help them in making informed decisions. And to do that I want to take you through three what I'll call fairly simple tools from a farmer perspective about decision making. And then I want to do a couple, show you a couple of tools around how as a project manager I think we can understand a bit more about the decision making process. I want to start with a quote and the quote is just as farmers invest in inputs and machinery to grow and harvest crops, pastures and livestock, it's equally important to invest in and service the humans who are making the decisions. Faulty decision making is as damaging to a farm business as faulty in dysfunctional equipment. We wouldn't keep using a boom spray if half the nozzles were blocked. We wouldn't keep sowing if three or four of the air tubes are blocked. But quite often we'll keep making the same decisions around a farm business and farm decisions that are actually dysfunctional and we should be thinking differently about that. We've tried to pull a lot of that together in a small book here called the Farm Decision Making Book. I've got three hard copies of it so if people wanted to grab a copy of that and it brings together the idea around people's personality and temperament and how that affects decision making around farm business and risk and just around the whole decision making process. And it's also on a website which I'll leave up as the last slide. So the first tool I want to talk about is what actually influences a decision. The first one I reckon the one we're most familiar with and the one that we get taught a lot and we get a lot of information presented to us is around the head part of the decision of influencing the decision. So that's the logical stuff, it's the processing of information. Dave Cornish put it up there and he said you know it's called Farming by Excel spreadsheet. You can do all the calculations, you can do all the numbers and that's logically what we need to do. And as a consultant I've done lots of those, presented that to a client, go back three months, six months later, none of it's been adopted. Because there are other things at play that influence that decision and we focus a lot on wanting to get this bit of it right and neglect two other things. The second one is what I'll call the heart and that's the emotional part about the decision. These are values based, they bring in things like preferences, your beliefs, your goals. And we often neglect what they are in a farming business and we just want to worry about the analytics, the numbers, does this add up, is this better than something else. And to do justice to it we've also got to accept and take that into account and try and find the right balance. And the third part of it is what I call the gut. And this is the intuition. And if anybody that's farmed and you speak to an experienced farmer, a lot of their decisions are based on intuition. Because I've been around the block a few times. I've seen a drought, I've seen good years, I've seen a whole lot of different experiences. And so just because we have the numbers that stack up and tell you that you're going to get a better return on investment by doing A than B, quite often they won't do it because of the influence of the heart and the influence of the gut. So that's the first framework I want to put out for you. Is that we need to think about those three. And if we want to consult and help people make better decisions, we need to appreciate that. Second framework I want us to think about is one about the types of decisions we've got to make in farming. And I'll distill this down into three fairly simply. First one is a simple decision. On the weekend my wife and I had to drench 1,000 Weenus sheep. Pretty simple decision, we looked up the drum, knew the weight of the animals, knew how much to drench them. Pretty simple decision, we make lots of those in farming all the time. We also have to make some complicated decisions, I'll call them. And they're decisions that have got lots of aspects to them but you can work your way through them. Quite often you can model them and quite often we do, whole farm models and we can do spreadsheets and we can do calculations. And generally you can come out with the right answer. You can trade various things off. Now when we're starting to put rotations together we're all looking at different herbicide groups and making sure we rotate them so we don't build up resistance. They're complicated decisions but generally there's a right answer to it. There's a solution to it. The third one, which we don't get together very well, is what I'll call the complex decisions. And the complex decisions is when there are so many things at play and particularly influences around the heart and the gut that you just can't model them. We just can't calculate them. We think we can, we can't. And in agriculture for most of the decisions I make in farming businesses and advising on big decisions, they're complex decisions. And in those complex decisions we need to take the head and the heart into consideration as well. And the third framework I want to put up there is around farmer temperament. How many people have heard of Meier's Bricks? A few people have, okay? Most people remember what all the different letters stand for. I can't, okay? So I'm going to give you a different definition of what they are. But if people are familiar with it I reckon this is a really useful bit of work for us to start to think about farming businesses that are out there. So there's over 100,000 farming businesses in the country. Just under 100,000 of them are family affairs. So we're dealing with small businesses that will have certain personalities and certain temperament types. And we need to be able to understand that. Because the importance that I've realised out of this is that if you can understand the temperament of the farmer that you're working with, then there's certain ways I'd like to be communicated to, the level that you pitch your information at, the calculations that you do, and a whole lot of other aspects about making and influencing or helping to influence that decision. Now I'll break these up into four groups. And these four groups are based on some great work that fellow by name of Rod Straugh did in Queensland, a psychologist. And Rod did some fantastic work on this and looked at farming communities and then compared it to the rest of the country. And he used the Meier's Bricks type lettering system of change them or a group of us have changed them to four different names that we reckon reflect four different types of groups in the farming community. First ones are what's called the SJ, if you understand Meier's Bricks, but we'll call them the dependables. And the dependables are people that love farming. And in fact, the greatest kick they get out of life is producing stuff. Good food, good fibre. They love growing grain. They love growing wool. Love growing meat. And you know these people, because when you actually walk onto the farm, the best fleece is always sitting on the table, didn't go in the bale, it's sitting there so that when they take you into the wool sheath, they can show you what they grow and what they do. They're very reliable people and they work repetitively on things. They all spend weeks sowing and get a real buzz out of that. Now I put my kids on it and two hours later they're bored, can't we do something else? But these are dependable people. Like doing the same sort of thing. Don't change easily. Don't change for change's sake. There's got to be good reason for them to change. And they're very community-oriented. They won't be leaders in the community, but they'll help out in the community. So they'll always be on the firetruck or they'll be in the canteen at the footy or netball. They're generally fairly neat. I call this a shadowboard test. If I go onto a farm and I can see a shadowboard, and this is an incredible one, but it's actually a real one from a farmer in South Australia, that's what their shadowboard and their workshop look like when you walked in. And they're someone that have very neat and have a list of things that they're going to do. They're very precise about the way they do it. And all their equipment works. As you go around the farm, every bit of equipment you see works and works well. And just by those types of observations and a few conversations I can have, I can understand that they're in that sort of group. And then I can respond and interact with them and provide information in a certain way. Then we've got a second group. I'll call them the doers, they're the SPs. SPs are a bit like the dependables, except they tend to work at a more frantic pace and they tend to rush from one thing to another. Never quite tied off, never tight finish it. The dependables finish something, finish a job at the end. So they'll use 10 fittings to get water from there to there. Just go through the workshop and find bits to stick it all together. They'll pull a wheel off something to stick on something else so seating gets finished in time. So they rip through and do this sort of stuff. Generally pretty reliable. Love farming and love the producing stuff. The woolshed, you go into the woolshed, it's nearly cleaned up. If they had another hour or two they would have packed up those oddments and they would have been gone as well. But we've had to tear off and do another job. So there's always a little bit left behind. And the workbench looks a bit different. They can generally find something on the workbench. They just take a minute or two to sort of look around and find it. So there are two groups. Now they're not as distinct as saying they're either this or this. But largely I can see them falling into these two categories. And then there's the third on the right-hand side. One group I call the NFS, I'll call them the pioneers. They're the first to try something in the district. So they'll be the ones that'll try the chaff carts to pick up and your ryegrass when they're cropping. They're the ones that'll adopt new technology quickly and first. And at the moment they're really loving these things. I don't know what to do with them. I've got a couple of clients that are like this. And we've just got masses of data. And now we're going, what the hell do we do with this stuff? How do we make a decision on them? But they think there's something in it. So the pioneers are the ones that are out there having to go and stuff. They lose a lot of money on the way. But every now and again they snag something that's really good and really big and takes them ahead. And they love to be out there. And they love to think strategically about big picture type issues. And then the last group I've got in here are the team builders. And they're the NJs if you have Mies, Briggs type stuff. And they're people that farm with intergenerational change in mind. That's a lovely photo. That's one of the clients, Harry. And that's his grandchildren. And that's lunchtime. So Harry will stop the header at lunchtime. And most people are just going flat out to get the crop off. Harry will stop, grandkids will come in there and they'll all sit there and eat lunch together. The ones that tend to have more of an environmental benture of focus. So you walk on the farm and you see lots of landcare type stuff. And they really love that landcare type aspect of it. And as well as that, they both genders have an equal role in business. So not the males do this and the females do something else. Everybody does it across. So therefore, types that I've put up there and it's taken me 30 years to start to appreciate where those people come from. But the important thing is when we start to think about farming to the rest of the population, that the dependables, farmers about 55% Australian population is about 40%. The doers, farmers about 25% Australian population is about 15%. Pioneers, different again. And if you look at the team builders, they're about a quarter of what the average Australian population is. Which means that we've got four out of five farmers over here who are tactical, like small detail type stuff, start from the small build up to the strategic. These over here see the strategic, see the big picture, and don't worry too much about the detail. And if you reflect on a lot of stuff that we do in agriculture, we want people to see the big picture and be strategic about it. And we talk a lot about how your business has got to take a big strategic focus. These people will take a big strategic focus, but we don't start with the strategy. We start with the detail and build up. These people here, you can put the strategy to them and they find ways of making it happen. And quite often, we tend to want to concentrate on these people because we see these are the ones as innovators and the opportunity. I'd put it to you that if we can get our act together from an extension and engagement point of view with this part, we can actually advance the industry a hell of a lot as well. So not the laggards that are going to drop off at the end. It's that we haven't actually met these people very well. So there are three frameworks that I'll put up to you about farm decision making. Just quickly, I want to talk about two now of the program managers hat on. Many people have seen this tool called ADOPT. A few people have, come on, okay, three or four. I reckon this is a grouse tool, okay. This was developed by the CSIRO and sorry, the Future Farm Industries CRC of which the CSIRO had a large part to plan it. And what it does is it looks at an innovation and looks at the characteristics of that innovation and what would make a farmer adopted or not adopted to a point that allows you to predict a level of engagement that you might get, okay. It's a simple Excel-based thing. You can download it for your charge. And while this is a very complicated slide, what it does is it takes into account all the things that from the literature influences how farmers make decisions and what will influence a decision and whether they'll adopt or not and how quickly they'll adopt it. So things around profit, around risk, around how long before the profit's realised, can you reverse innovation? Is it easy and convenient? How easy is it to trial, to observe and so on? What you do is with this tool, and this is question 18, time until future profits are realised, you just pick one of those answers. And you do that for all 22 questions that you've got there and you end up with a response that's calculated like this. So that's the typical S curve or the adoption curve that we get in any agricultural innovation and it starts to give you some prediction. So in this case here, the time to 90% adoption will be 11 and a half years and we'd expect about 60% of the population that we were targeting are likely to take up this innovation. And from a manager's point of view, that's heaps better than what people used to do to me which was just promise of world. In five years we're gonna have 50% of farmers doing this sort of stuff and it's just nonsense. So I reckon if you haven't gotten onto this tool, this is a fantastic one to get a handle on different innovations and how long it might take to get adopted. And the last one I'll touch on just very briefly is that with the program managers hat on, as I said, people will promise you the world and they'll promise you the world as far as not how many people are gonna adopt it but what impact it'll have on farm. And this is a quick little tool that was put together as part of the Grown and Grays program with Queensland Government and the GRDC. What it allows us to do is compare different scenarios very quickly. So we've created a whole lot of farm scenarios. So what's example here is we've just created five different soil types in the typical farm system, size of the paddock and a few other things around the soils. And we're allowed to create rotations here. In this rotation here we've got canola in a stubble wheat then stubble barley stubble and so on. And we can actually then get a whole lot of calculations out of it about what the impact would be from a baseline farm or if we changed or got a certain innovation adopted on that farm. And so it generates different values here. The thing I like about it is it's not just based solely on economics or production, it's also got some environmental things down here of what it might do for things like runoff and drainage, evaporation and so on. So we can start to bring some of the environmental things in. And when we've run a few programs through this, what we've promised the modeler be suggesting that in fact we're not gonna get anywhere near that and in fact some things are antagonistic. So we suggest that we might make a change in the farming system and in fact it's got some negative consequences as well as some positives as well. And this helps us bring that out and allows us also to look at some of the risk involved with things like box and whisker graphs. So I'll finish up there, I think. So there are the four tools I spoke about. I've got a paper actually in there or Rod Straughn's papers there and also through a group called APEN. I wrote an example for a conference slate last year about how we integrated weed management, how we could approach that differently with the four different temperament types and how we need different approaches to target and to reach each of those four. So I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you.