How private-sector farm advisors change their practices: An Australian case study

There is increasing interest in the extent to which private-sector farm advisors support farmer responses to emerging challenges, such as climate variability or new forms of agricultural production. However, scholars have paid limited attention to what motivates farm advisors to develop their knowledge and how they go about changing their practice in areas outside their disciplinary expertise. This paper presents a qualitative study of the processes of change in the advisory practices of private-sector farm advisors who were provided with formal training as part of an Australian dairy sector extension program. This training focussed on the farm workforce and employment, and involved efforts to engage livestock production and agronomic advisors in this challenging area for farm management advice. We drew on theoretical concepts of practice and professional identity formation and found that engagement in the new area created conflict with how the advisors thought about their professional identity. Three key processes enabled advisory practice change: envisioning new advisory roles; experimenting with new advisory identities; and legitimisation of new advisory practices from both farmers and the advisors' business. While farming clients' demand for advice increased the advisors' interest in knowledge acquisition, this alone did not provide the environment for individual and collective reflexivity to cope with the complexity, risk and uncertainty of developing new advisory practices. The support of the dairy industry in forming a new practice community was found to assist the development of new advisory identities. A wider conceptualisation of the advisors' world (their identity, practices and their needs) is required if private-sector advisors are to play a greater role in helping farmers respond to emerging challenges.