B.CCH.8305 - Forewarned is Forearmed: Sugar Industry Workbook

Summary

The Forewarned is Forearmed climate coaching for on-farm decision making project (referred to as the ‘FWFA extension project’) has been the final phase of the five-year Forewarned is Forearmed (FWFA) project, and focused on the extension of the project outputs to industry, and more specifically, to service providers in the dairy, red meat, grains, wine and sugar industries in southern Australia. The target audience was southern-Australian based advisors who will deliver workshops to producers to drive adoption of the five new Bureau of Meteorology forecasting tools for extreme weather events. The desired result of the project will be trained advisors, who are well-equipment with appropriate resources, to support the training of producers to use the tools, which will decrease the impacts that extreme weather events have on farm production and on business profitability.

Objectives

The main objectives of the FWFA extension project were to build the extension product and to train advisors from the five industries to deliver workshops to producers, to encourage use of the FWFA tools to improve risk management beyond the life of the FWFA project.

Key findings

High-quality learning materials and resources to support FWFA producer workshop delivery were created.

Ten pilot deliverers were trained to use the FWFA tools and to deliver workshops to producers in phase 2. Five face-to-face pilot workshops were delivered to 32 producers in different regions across southern Australia, and to different industries.

Thirty-seven advisors completed the train-the trainer process in phase 3, representing the red meat, dairy, grain, wine, sugar and cotton industries.

Benefits to industry

The benefits to industry resulting from the project include:
• A suite of resources for advisors and producers which can be used to support learning about and confidence building for using the FWFA resources.
• Trained advisors who can facilitate workshops with producers to support their learning journey.
• More resilient producers who will be supplying food and fibre to Australia.

Future research

Care should be taken to ensure that any changes to the tools on the Bureau of Meteorology site are communicated and reflected in the FWFA extension resource pack.

Future adoption projects of this nature would benefit from have the adoption phase embedded in the project from the commencement of the research and development phase.