Helping build extension capacity across grower groups with the Soil CRC

By Simon Kruger, WMG

Between late 2023 and early 2026, WMG led a Soil CRC project on how grower groups build their capacity to design, deliver and evaluate extension work, which is the layer that sits beneath much of the on-farm research that eventually reaches growers. The project was not about a single practice or result. Its purpose was to strengthen how groups assess whether a soil practice is worth the money and to improve the methods behind that assessment.

WMG did not carry this alone. The work brought together four grower groups from across the country, WMG, Corrigin Farm Improvement Group, Riverine Plains and Agricultural Innovation and Research Eyre Peninsula, alongside research partners at three universities.

What the project set out to do

The Soil CRC’s Program 1 produced a body of work on how soil management practices are extended and adopted, including a set of tools for grower groups to use. Having the tools available and having groups use them well are different things. Grower groups run extension under real constraints, tight timelines, limited staff, and project funding that rarely covers the design and evaluation work that makes extension effective. Across the four partner groups, those constraints looked much the same despite very different regions and farming systems.

The project, Soil CRC Project 1.2.008, “Packaging Soil CRC tools to enhance the extension and adoption of improved soil management practices”, set out to close part of that gap. It aimed to package the Program 1 tools into a form groups could pick up and apply, to build the internal capability that lets a group design and evaluate its own extension rather than treating each project as a one-off, and to develop a way of measuring whether that extension delivered value. That last aim became the Benefit-Cost Analysis tool.

None of this was framed as solving extension. The project was upfront that its hardest constraints, project timing, whether the evidence is ready to extend, and resourcing, sit beyond what any tool or toolkit can fix. What it could do was give groups better structure and a shared method to work with, and put the case that extension design deserves to be funded and treated as research in its own right.

A national collaboration

The grower groups supplied the real-world settings the work had to fit, spanning very different regions, soils and farming systems, which kept the tools grounded in how groups actually operate rather than how they might in principle. Through Professor Vaughan Higgins, the University of Tasmania facilitated the early work that established a shared picture across the groups, running focus group interviews with each partner and drawing the findings into a common analysis. That analysis showed the constraints on extension were broadly consistent across the groups despite their very different circumstances.

Associate Professor Hanabeth Luke at Murdoch University contributed expertise in extension tool application and knowledge sharing, drawing on her earlier Soil CRC work including the Knowledge Sharing project, and the University of Newcastle, through Professor Frank Agbola with Dr Mesfin Genie, developed the economic side of the work into the Benefit-Cost Analysis tool. WMG led and coordinated the project while also taking part as one of the four groups, which meant testing the emerging tools on its own extension work as they developed.

What the project produced

Two main outputs came out of the work.

The first is an Extension Toolkit, a set of seven structured tools, each with an onboarding guide and template, that together give a group a complete process for designing, delivering and evaluating its own extension. It steps a group through scoping a project, judging what the evidence can support, identifying what farmers need, building a plain-language account of the risks and rewards of a practice, and planning delivery across the season. One of the tools works as a check on evidence readiness, helping a group decide what can be communicated with confidence and what is not yet ready to put in front of farmers, which several groups found as useful as the material they produced.

The second is the Benefit-Cost Analysis tool. It gives grower groups a way to run their own trial and project data through a consistent economic assessment, estimating whether a practice stacks up on a per-hectare basis and testing how sensitive that result is to changes in prices and costs. It is built as a decision aid rather than a predictor, meant to show under what conditions a practice makes economic sense rather than to forecast a single figure. The tool began as a contracted Excel model and grew into a full online platform, well beyond the original scope, and now includes a feature that drafts an extended written report from the analysis. It is useful in that form and still developing, with Frank and his team continuing to improve it and welcoming feedback from anyone who puts it to use.

Both tools are built for groups and extension providers to use rather than for the individual grower. What reaches a farmer is indirect but real. The BCA tool was made for groups to run their own trial results through, and the value a grower feels is a more consistent, better-founded assessment of what pays, sitting behind the results and advice they see.

Availability and acknowledgements

Both outputs are available to others working in grower groups, extension or industry. The BCA tool is on the University of Newcastle website at www.newcastle.edu.au/soil-crc-bca-tool and can be used now, and the Extension Toolkit will be accessible through the Soil CRC Knowledge Hub shortly. A workshop to demonstrate the BCA tool and support its wider use is planned for later in 2026.

This was a substantial piece of work, and it is a small contribution to a much larger effort to lift how soil research reaches and changes practice on farm. WMG was glad to lead it, and to have the chance to do so through the Soil CRC, whose decision to make extension and adoption a research focus in its own right, through Program 1, is what made the project possible. The work depended on the four grower groups and their university partners, each of whom carried a part of it.

For more information, contact WMG at extension@wmgroup.org.au.

Soil CRC Project 1.2.008 was supported by the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils (Soil CRC), led by West Midlands Group and delivered in partnership with Corrigin Farm Improvement Group, Riverine Plains, Agricultural Innovation and Research Eyre Peninsula, the University of Tasmania, Murdoch University and the University of Newcastle.