Elders has teamed up with red meat marketing and research peak body, Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) to co-develop new ways to gather feedback and share research information with producers to lift farm productivity.
The three-year pilot will utilise the agribusiness company’s network of 75 livestock agents and senior managers in Queensland.
The plan is to co-develop, establish and evaluate a new research adoption and co-innovation model.
The program aims to better identify producer needs, as well as new research and development ideas, improve adoption and better engage with innovative Queensland producers.
It will utilise Elders’ online community research portal, known as Elders Insiders, to gather, record and feedback information.
This portal has the capacity to deliver questions, research outcomes and case studies to specific groups online – and allows producers to view and comment on information relevant to their business.
The pilot program is co-funded by Elders through the MLA Donor Company (MDC), with no producer levies being used.
Elders is appointing a livestock research, development and adoption manager in its north zone to oversee the pilot – helping to co-ordinate agents and facilitate the flow of information between producers, MLA and Elders.
Elders’ northern zone general manager, Greg Dunne, said the pilot will take advantage of the strong relationships Elders has with Queensland red meat producers and, through these interactions, develop an effective two-way flow of information about business needs and innovative solutions.
Nationally, Elders has around 200 agents along with 280 livestock sales staff in the field.
Mr Dunne said who collectively they had in excess of 10,800 one-on-one contact hours each week with producers.
“Having both MLA and Elders support each other by developing new research and innovative ideas alongside producers, and more importantly how best to apply that research on-farm will ultimately have a great benefit for our industry,” he said.
MLA managing director, Richard Norton, said MLA continued to develop new models to solicit innovative ideas and needs from producers and to disseminate regional and business specific innovative solutions.
“As well as enabling MLA to gather further advice and feedback from producers to guide our work, this pilot offers a unique opportunity to share those MLA research and development outcomes that are specific to Queensland producers through the Elders network,” he said.
“For MLA, it is another direct means to collect targeted and near real-time information to even better inform us on producers’ R&D, market intelligence, communication and adoption needs.
“Ultimately, that means MLA can better assist producers to improve productivity and profitability.”
The MLA and Elders co-innovation and adoption pilot program will be officially launched by Elders’ Mr Dunne and Mr Norton will be discussing the new initiative at Beef Australia’s in Rockhampton at Elders’ client event on May 9.