Knowledge in Ag is Power - Part 3: Lifting an entire industry
Show Notes
Tea tree oil and nanotechnology for fly strike and foot-rot resistant sheep…. These are just some of the exciting innovations happening in agriculture. But how do you lift an entire sector or industry?
It’s not always easy in farming when most of us work alone or with family.
But in this episode, you'll hear about the benefits of taking part in extension programs, learning from research trials, and even just forming local groups to learn from your neighbours.
Emily King is the National Extension Manager for Australian Wool Innovation. She's based in Dubbo and in her role, delivers a range of programs to help growers improve their production and trial the latest in research. In this episode, Emily discusses some of the latest innovations for wool production and sheep as well as some of the most successful extension programs that are still being delivered today.
So if you’re keen to improve farming practices and production not just on your farm, but for your whole community or industry, this episode is for you!
This is the third and final episode in our Knowledge is Power series that we're making in collaboration with Rural Industries Skill Training (RIST). Make sure you listen to the other two episodes: “Building a farm business from scratch” - feat. Dr Lexi Leonard and “Managing the Family Farm” - feat. Rachael McGrath.
Thank you to our episode sponsor: Rural Industries Skill Training (RIST)
More about RIST:
We are a leading independent provider of Training & Education for the Agricultural Sector.Located in the heart of Victoria's Western District, RIST are your Local Agricultural College with a National Reach. TOID4198
This podcast is produced by the Rural Podcasting Co.
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Emily King: 0:10
With extension. A lot of people are always saying you know, but you haven't got 100% adoption of that, so it's a failure. But I don't, just categorically don't, agree with that.
Kirsten Diprose: 0:21
Hello and welcome to Ducks on the Pond, brought to you by the Rural Podcasting Co. I'm Kirsten Dipp-Rose and this is the third and final episode in our Knowledge is Power series that we're making in collaboration with Rural Industries, skill Training or RIST, and this one is a little bit different to the previous two episodes because we're looking at how do you increase knowledge in an entire sector in agriculture, and essentially it's about working together, and that's not always easy in farming when most of us work alone or with family. But in this episode you'll hear about the benefits of taking part in extension programs, learning from research trials and even just forming local groups to learn from your neighbors. And I reckon we women are particularly good at bringing people together. And that's what Emily King does.
Kirsten Diprose: 1:12
For a job, she's the National Extension Manager at the Australian Wool Industry, or AWI for short. She's based in Dubbo, and in her role Emily delivers a range of programs to help growers improve their production, trial the latest in research, and there's some pretty cool stuff that you'll hear about, from tea tree oil for fly strike to breeding foot rot resistant sheep. See, I often say ducks on the pond is not about baking scones. Clearly it's about far less savoury things. But when it comes to innovation, there's actually been one extension program that Emily picks as being the standout from what she's seen and interestingly, it's not the sexy stuff like drones or robots or even regen ag and that's no reflection on those things, because they're great and perhaps their day is still to come. But what's really exciting is that by growing our own farming businesses and collaborating with others, we can improve the whole industry. So let's meet Emily King.
Emily King: 2:17
I grew up in Forbes in central New South Wales so my grandparents had a farm just outside town, just at the eastern side of Forbes, between Forbes and Ygarra. So I was the first grandchild born. So I spent a lot of time out with my grandparents when mum went back to work and, yeah, and really just always enjoyed being at the farm. And then as I grew older and I guess had more of a choice in where I went, I still chose to go out and spend a lot of time out on the farm. So anything that was happening around the farm I liked to get involved with, but mostly stock work and I spent a lot of time with my grandfather out doing sheet work and that sort of thing. And neighbours of ours used to use our shearing shed so I used to go and volunteer my time just to spend a bit more time doing sheet work up at the yards and in the shed. So yeah, that was, I guess, where it started. And then did ag at school and wanted to persist with it as a career as well.
Kirsten Diprose: 3:14
Yeah, so where did you study and what did you study?
Emily King: 3:17
I studied a Bachelor of Farm Management at Charles Sturt Uni at Orange. I originally had thought I wanted to do an ag science degree and and frankly I was pretty lazy at school and didn't quite get the marks again to ag science. So I thought I'd start a bachelor of farm management and then swap over into ag science. But when I got there I actually realized that it was probably a lot more suited to me and rather than a straight science degree. So looking more at the agricultural and management side of things and more systems-based and how things are implemented and how things interrelated with each other, was of much more interest to me than straight science-based discipline. So that very luckily worked out for the best.
Emily King: 3:59
I really enjoyed that degree and got to do a lot of things and opened up a lot of horizons I suppose that I frankly didn't even know existed before I started uni, like what Well, I guess. So I work now as the extension manager for Australian World Innovation. I didn't. I'd literally never heard the word extension used in terms of agricultural education. I suppose I'd never even heard it applied to that. I probably knew what an extension cord was, but apart from that probably never used the word extension.
Kirsten Diprose: 4:30
I didn't know what it was either. I didn't know what it was until I became involved in ag. It kind of makes no sense. Yep, you know, I guess it's extension of knowledge. Is that what it's meant to mean?
Emily King: 4:42
Yeah, and extending. I mean the way I explain it and I'm still not convinced that I've got, you know, a nice neat, tidy way to explain it but how I normally explain it is that we're extending the research and development in formats that is more useful and functional to on-ground and practical application. So yeah, that's how I think about it the extension of the research and development on ground.
Kirsten Diprose: 5:05
But does it go both ways? Because a lot of things happen on ground that really needs to go back into research.
Emily King: 5:11
Yeah, 100%, absolutely. So there's a lot of two-way conversations that happen and we often find that we get our best outcomes when we have growers speaking with researchers, because often growers will notice things happening on farm and or will have found some. You know, never underestimate the ingenuity or curiosity of an Australian farmer. They've got, you know, a workaround or a solution for everything. It's quite amazing. It never fails to amaze me some of the things that growers come up with. I mean, at last count over 75 000 people. Businesses paid awi levy last year. You know there's a lot of people growing wool around australia and I am very, very fortunate in my job to meet a lot of them and be able to interact with a lot of them, and I've never seen two people do it the same way. There's always something different.
Kirsten Diprose: 6:11
Do you get on farm much yourself these days, like whether that's back in Forbes or just in your travels?
Emily King: 6:18
Yeah, so my grandparents have since sold the farm. So yeah, don't, unfortunately, a family property anymore at Forbes. They've since moved to town, retired to town. But yeah, I'm very lucky. It comes a bit in fits and starts. Sometimes I will have spent a fair bit of time on farm and that might be going and filming a case study or writing a case study, or it could be hosting a workshop on a wool grower's property, or it might be going out to visit a trial site for a research trial or something like that. So I do still get to spend a fair bit of time on farm, not as much as I would like, but you can't ever win them all. How do you?
Kirsten Diprose: 6:58
go about designing programs that are going to make an impact as an extension manager, that you know farmers are going to go to and that, I suppose, push the industry in new ways, like, do you sit down and strategically think about those sorts of things?
Emily King: 7:15
Yeah, yes, we do. People might think that it just happens, or sometimes we might be accused of not having thought about it, but a lot of time and effort goes into the background of putting it together. So I guess to start with we would identify a need. So that is often from on-ground feedback. You know, we might have a lot of people saying to us god, I just can't find information, still got massive problems with wieners, for example. You know we really really need to do something about it. Sometimes we might have a new piece of research that's come through. So we're looking at the outcomes. Do we have an existing extension product that we just need to update and get new messaging through, or is there enough in this, or is this a big enough change for industry that we need to create a whole new extension package?
Emily King: 8:03
I think after COVID, the extension landscape has changed greatly and I think anyone who's tried to run an event in a regional area or even not even just regional it's happening all around the world, but it's very, very difficult to get people to register and commit and commit time and commit to things at the moment.
Emily King: 8:24
Things have to be just absolutely perfect timing, and so there's a lot of things that you think tick all the boxes and that should work, and they don't always think as well with extension. A lot of people are always saying you know, but you haven't got 100% adoption of that, so it's a failure. But I don't just categorically don't agree with that because I think for a couple of reasons. I think, at the end of the day, our job is to provide the research and provide the information in the easiest possible way to adopt. However, and obviously we can always do better we're always striving to do better, be better, try harder, look at novel ways of doing things for people, but also, you know, not everything is for everyone. Sometimes people don't want to adopt something, and that could be for a myriad of reasons.
Kirsten Diprose: 9:12
It's an adoption curve for a reason, and it's hard to, I think, for anyone to predict when that curve is going to happen, and we have that uptake all of a sudden. Have you got any examples perhaps?
Emily King: 9:25
Yeah, I think Lifetime U certainly has an incredible name and legacy across the industry and you know I certainly wasn't around when it was first conceived. When was it first conceived? It was first delivered in 2005, 2006. So I was still a wee baby at uni back then.
Emily King: 9:45
And so the Lifetime Wool research ran from 2001 till 2008, and so Lifetime U was created out of the Lifetime Wool research ran from 2001 till 2008. And so Lifetime U was created out of the Lifetime Wool research project and so it was delivered, piloted sort of around that Hamilton region, which is where RISC so AWI and RISC co-own and deliver Lifetime U management. And so that's where it started, because Lifetime U has been going for such a long time and it's such a big investment, both in the preceding research through lifetime wool and then through lifetime you, and awi is currently still offering a subsidy of 900 per participant to to lifetime you, so still a significant industry investment in that space. I think the other really great thing about lifetime you is that because you pick a mob of views from your own place and follow them through that whole year and the whole reproduction cycle, you can really see the difference that your decisions and your management impacts are having. So, yeah, it's been an extraordinarily popular, well-loved course and continues going strong even after all this time.
Kirsten Diprose: 10:52
Except my husband traded out my mob of ewes, and so then I had to have a different mob of ewes and I was like what about my course? And so I was the only one in my course with a different mob of ewes, but it was a it's, it's fun, because you're like well, we did it all with our neighbours. We were just on each other's farms throughout the year and it was very casual and unlike any other course I've ever done.
Emily King: 11:18
Yeah, absolutely, and I think certainly the industry figures are somewhere around 95% of Australian farmers enjoy hands-on learning and so a lot of people that go into farming quite enjoy that hands-on learning and so a lot of people that go into farming quite enjoy that hands-on learning. And for a lot of people, seeing is believing, and you know we do it all the time in the industry. We wait until someone else has implemented it and then we look over the fence or you know we have, you know even in the cropping world, for example, the National Variety Trials, and so you know you have new crop species or cultivars being trialled in paddocks so that you can actually see it growing in your region and have a look over the fence before you really go health or leather on your own place. Back when Lifetime U first started, a lot of people had never heard of condition scoring. A lot of people had never done feed budgeting in the way that Lifetime U promotes feed budgeting. Now we have people who have never even done Lifetime U, who have downloaded the app and we've seen over time and I'm not saying it's only Lifetime U, but certainly a lot of that Lifetime U research has been utilised a lot across industry and we've seen for when people are coming into Lifetime U when they do their incoming data, we've seen that the average landmarking rates and that sort of thing are up 10 percentage points based on what they were back at the start. So the whole of the industry has lifted A lot of the key practices that are promoted in Lifetime U, for example feed budgeting and understanding feed-on-offer and assessing feed-on-offer condition scoring, pregnancy scanning, all those sort of things. A lot of people are already doing a lot of those things and are using Lifetime U to cobble it all together and really fine-tune it rather than make massive leaps. So I think certainly that Lifetime U research has been instrumental across the industry and we've seen a bit of a slow burn of uptake from that but it it's now sort of been exponential. That growth is that research and getting that extension material out through lifetime you and getting it out across the industry. So we've had over 5 000 people enroll in l10 now. So huge, very long-term extension program I mean.
Emily King: 13:33
One other example would be with our winning with wieners course. The reason we put that workshop together, that one day workshop, was because our AWI extension New South Wales producer advisory panel said to us we really need a wiener workshop. You know we're really struggling and we need that. So we went about putting that together based on their feedback and and in that we built the wiener feed budget tables which we're trying to build, something kind of like the lifetime wool feed budget tables, because we're like well, people are familiar with that concept now, so we'd like to try and do something like that, and we couldn't do the exact same thing because of the importance of protein and energy in growing animals, but we were still able to put those feed budget tables together and and I think it was one of the greatest days of my career when, when a grower said to me I've used that thing so much, I've worn it out, I love it.
Emily King: 14:25
Am I allowed to have another one? And he said you know, after lifetime, you that winning with wieners course has made the single largest improvement to our business and I love that feed budget table. I use it all the time. So that was really that was a great day at work. And you don't you know, you don't often hear a lot of feedback about a lot like we, we collect feedback and we do surveys and we follow up people. But, yeah, you, often you don't hear stories like that a lot, but when you do, it's quite satisfying. It was, yeah, that was definitely a good day at work. It stuck with me.
Kirsten Diprose: 14:57
Yeah, I guess that's why you do it.
Emily King: 14:58
Yeah, absolutely, and it doesn't matter where we take it in Australia, like growers, at the same point, every single time, growers will ask the exact same question every single time, or they'll want to know, like in our fly strike extension program, every time we talk about maggots this is a nice conversation about maggots overwintering and living in the ground. Every time, growers say but how cold does it have to get before they die? Like every time.
Kirsten Diprose: 15:25
so we've written some frequently asked questions yeah, well, how cold does it need to get before they die?
Emily King: 15:31
We haven't found it yet. There's been no, there's been instances. So one of Australia's leading fly researchers, dr Peter James, there's been instances of Wasillia caprina maggots hatching from under snow. So the cold's not going to kill them, unfortunately. Yeah, they're quite, quite well adapted to overwintering, so even after the floods, everyone was saying do they get drowned in the floods, do they? Nah, nah, not enough of them anyway they're amazing creatures, aren't they? Oh they're. I'll tell you what it's fascinating, fascinating. Look evolution. They're really well adapted. Yeah, unfortunately.
Kirsten Diprose: 16:13
What's some of the most interesting research that excites you at the moment?
Emily King: 16:19
Yeah, there's some really interesting research going on at the moment. So the peewees have actually done quite a bit of foot rock research and so now we're doing a lot of that in Australia as well. Foot rot research, and so now we're doing a lot of that in australia as well. So looking at being able to understand the genetic differences between sheep for their predisposition, foot rot, so that hopefully we'd be able to breed sheep that just have a much, much higher natural resistance to foot rot. You know, it's just in a lot of sheep production regions around Australia. It's endemic and it's crippling, figuratively and literally, and so it would be really great, really really great improvement in productivity and welfare for a lot of sheep if we can get that out to industry as well.
Emily King: 17:03
I mean, from a personal interest point of view, I still really, really enjoy a lot of the production efficiency stuff. So a lot of the production efficiency stuff. So a lot of the repro efficiency and nutritional efficiency work and just better understanding, you know, management decisions and how we can get the most out of the resources that we've got, because for most people their resources are limiting. You've only got so much land and you've only got so much grass, and you've only got so many ewes and all that sort of thing. So trying to get the most out of the natural resources that you've got to play with.
Emily King: 17:36
I find quite exciting also some interesting research, and we're co-investing with a number of other organizations in some research on being able to use nanotechnology for better application of chemicals. If people are putting chemicals on, so being able to look at if we can put on much less chemical but have it adhere more effectively to the wool so that you can put on way less but it works a lot better and can stay for longer. Or we could look at potentially one project we're having a look at at the moment is using nanotechnology and encapsulation of tea tree oil to see if you can use tea tree oil as an insecticide, as a natural fly strike repellent Wow yeah, so that's quite cool.
Kirsten Diprose: 18:24
Like if you say that people will go, oh, okay, that's serious. But if some people say oh, say, oh, no, you can just use tea tree oil on the wall, it'll stop the fly strike. No one would believe you no, well, you can.
Emily King: 18:39
The problem is it just washes out and you know it's not particularly uv stable. So you know, we were originally looking at most of the nanotechnology research to look at traditional chemicals, synthetic chemicals and keeping on. But then we thought, well, let'sotechnology research to look at traditional chemicals, synthetic chemicals and keeping on. But then we thought, well, let's also have a look at it for natural alternatives to see if we can, say, keep the tea tree oil on for weeks instead of a couple of days and see if that could be an option. So lots of interesting things going on.
Kirsten Diprose: 19:11
The biggest challenge with wool, though, is probably the price and the market. How do you overcome that with innovation, can you?
Emily King: 19:20
Yeah, yeah, it's a hard one. So some of the work that's done and I don't work that personally, but colleagues work on the post-farm side so, looking at product development and innovation, so whether that be innovation in, for example, the people that make knitting machines, might have come up with a new. Well, you know, a couple of years ago did come off in a roll and then you know, you would lay that piece of fabric down, you would put the pattern on top of it and you would cut around the pattern and then you would sew the garment together. So with the new knitting machines you can basically feed the pattern into the computer and then, instead of knitting a flat piece of fabric and cutting it out yourself, the machine can knit the whole garment and spit it out the end. So massive, massive reduction in wastage of fabric and yarn because you don't have all those off-cut pieces where you cut around the pattern, much less labor, because you don't then need a person to cut around the pattern and then to do the make and sew. You know you're getting whole garments out the end of the machine. And also, if you wanted to do, if you wanted to do, say active wear and performance, so say you want to do a special cycling kit and you wanted to put lighter weight fabric in under the arms with like breathing holes in it and things like that, you would need to knit that fabric that with. You know the different knit on a separate machine, cut those little bits out and then you'd need to sew all that in. So with this new knitting machine you can do all that just in the pattern and so then it all comes out as one, so you're drastically reducing the seams.
Emily King: 21:09
However, the yarns that we already had in industry were not performance yarns that could run, so they weren't strong enough to run quickly enough in those brand-new fantastic machines. So colleagues of ours in the international offices for AWI worked to actually work with the knitting company and with the yarn spinners to actually make new fibre. You know, do different spins on the yarns so that they could be then used in these amazing flash new knitting machines. So innovation that's being pulled through industry and product development. The sports and activewear market is by far the quickest growing market.
Emily King: 21:51
For wool, I think as well. You know there's a lot of fibres that do things you know as well or in some cases better on. You know, single attributes, an amazing fiber and unfortunately, I completely sympathize with growers. You know the price at the moment is not reflecting the amazing fiber. You know that everyone's producing and and frankly it is. It's sad and it's demoralizing and it's you know, I think a lot of growers think that awi employees, I think, sit quite removed from we don't understand what's happening.
Emily King: 22:36
But I mean, we talk about it every day and I look at it and I think my career is in this industry as well. I'm really, really focused on what's happening on farm and I think if there's no future in sheep farming or wool farming or whatever in australia and I mean I, I mean I do strongly believe that there is, but if there's not, you know that's not good for me, or you know I don't have anything to gain by that. You know I've got everything to gain by trying to work as hard as absolutely possible to keep this as a viable, striving industry as well, because you know this is my career and this is where my future is as well. I mean, you know we'd love to see the price improve as well. So trying to work with the whole of the industry to innovate and keep wool at the forefront of everyone's minds.
Kirsten Diprose: 23:22
It's really an incredibly complex system when you think about it. Like not many other products have such complexity that you know you're there talking to a farmer about grass and the next day people in AWA are also talking about the size of knitting needles in machines to make garments. Yeah, like it's so complex. Yeah, you know, just compared to, just say, producing meat, it's a much kind of simpler step process.
Emily King: 23:52
It's a much shorter and more direct chain absolutely so, depending on what product you're making and quality specs of your wool and all that sort of thing.
Emily King: 23:59
But wool can, from shearing and export of greasy to getting a product on the shelf, wool can have 16 individual, completely individual steps in the supply chain. So it is quite a long and involved supply chain and there's a lot of people along that supply chain who are absolute specialists at their craft. So you know you've obviously got a wool grower who's, you know, an absolute specialist in growing the fibre. But then you know you've got a scourer. So the washing process and then you've got the top maker to, you know, blend all of the different wools together to make a very specific spec, to then be used by the yarn maker, the spinner, to then make the exact yarn that they need to then go into the knitted or woven product. So it's it's a long chain and it's quite complex, and I mean for something that's as old as the start of time, like people have been wearing wool clothes for thousands of years how do we make it so complex?
Emily King: 25:00
yeah, how did it get like this? But yeah, it is. There's a lot of people in that long supply chain and you know, and I guess I've been lucky in my time with awi one day I can be speaking to a about grass and reproduction. The next day I'm touring a Chinese fashion company through a shearing shed in the back of South Australia or taking French luxury brands through the auctions at Melbourne. So it's been absolutely eye-opening for me to, you know, be a kid from Forbes to be touring employees of Prada and Max Mara and Burberry and those type of companies.
Emily King: 25:40
Oh, I thought you'd be wearing that all the time. I know, yeah, I mean, yeah, my Prada doesn't look so good in the yards, that's for sure.
Kirsten Diprose: 25:50
I don't go in a sheep yard unless I'm in Prada.
Emily King: 25:53
Exactly, only Prada for the yards. Yeah, I wish That'd be nice. No, they haven't made a good pair of work pants that I've seen yet for the yards. But I'll look out for that. Yeah, let me know.
Kirsten Diprose: 26:08
But getting back to really your career, because we focused a lot well this series on people who are more on the ground in terms of running their own farms or involved in education as trainers, your role is sort of that systems role, that is, matching everything together. What are your reflections on that education piece at every level, when so many of us are really just hyper-focused on one area of a system, like in wool?
Emily King: 26:42
Yeah, definitely. I think people generally focus on what's in front of them and what needs to be done right now. A really great example of this is on farm. We're very focused often on what's right in front of us and needs to be done. Anyone that's involved in farming, you often see people scream into the resellers and rip into town because they're like, oh my God, we're doing line marking tomorrow and we don't have vaccine. Or oh, we don't have the rings. Or oh, shearing's starting tomorrow, I don't have enough wool packs.
Emily King: 27:13
So, we get very, very focused on what's right in front of us and and often people make plans to do things and then there's something pops up. Stuff happens all the time. So you've got to do what's right for you. Some people love to get on social media and talk about their day. You know, every day, you know I love, you know put up a picture whatever they're doing on the farm. For that, I mean, some people couldn't think of anything worse. So I think you've got to find what works for you. But if you are interested in things you know like, for example, with wool growing, like you know, if you do want to know more about the supply chain, there are ways of going about it, but it's not just going to fall on a platter in front of you.
Kirsten Diprose: 27:55
But any advice on, yeah, how to get that information, like when there's that perfect sheep that doesn't get foot rot and shears itself, how do I know how to get it, and that I can be one of those early adopters of the magical sheep.
Emily King: 28:11
Yeah, so we've got extension networks in every state and all of those extension networks have social media. So if that's your jam, definitely jump on Facebook. And so it's AWI Extension NSW, awi Extension SA, so on and so forth. There's also, so there's those newsletters, and with each of those extension networks as well. So their addresses are awi-extension-nswcom, awi-extension-viccom, so you can sign up to the newsletters on any of those websites as well, and so there's regular newsletters coming out to keep your breast of either research updates or things that have come out in industry, things that you can do now. It might be how to choose that footwork-free bloodline or something like that. That is just to be clear. That's still under active research. That's not out there. The magical foot rot-free sheep.
Emily King: 29:05
And the one that shears itself.
Kirsten Diprose: 29:06
I just made up, but there are sheep that shed themselves, but you obviously don't use those for wool. They're more for meat.
Emily King: 29:14
Yeah, meat sheep. Yeah, we obviously don't use those for wool, they're more for meat. Yeah, meat sheet. Yeah, we've also got the awi monthly grower newsletter, also beyond the bale, which is our quarterly publication. So definitely sign up and have a look at those. I would strongly encourage. You know, we'll be at a field day or we'll be out somewhere and someone will come up and say, oh, you know, I haven't seen anyone from awi for a while. You know, I've had this burning question and and I would definitely, definitely, if you know an AWI employee, give them a call anytime, definitely. But I would also say we have a receptionist at AWI. Her name's Anita. She's a very, very lovely lady. You can ring the AWI front office and say I've got this burning question about blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, and Anita will put you through to whoever of us it should be talking to you.
Emily King: 30:02
There's always people around. There's always, I think, probably network with other like-minded people in your area. So, whether that's physical area, region, that's the topic of you that you're interested in. There's a lot of online groups that are quite interested in certain areas of production and things like that. So there's lots of that as well.
Emily King: 30:26
You can form small regional groups. So, for example, if you've done lifetime, you and if you had a great crew, keep the band together, get a private consultant, just sort of say, look, we really want to look at this thing next, we want to talk about this. Set up your own discussion group and keep that going and then you know you can bring in industry consultants or you know specialists to speak to you about different things. I think there's a lot of very knowledgeable people roaming around in industry and I think don't absolutely don't discount the chats that you have in your own local social circles, whether that's at the footy or at the pub or at the you know school drop-off or wherever you're chatting about sheep. I don't know, I manage to have a chat about sheep everywhere, but exactly, yeah.
Kirsten Diprose: 31:11
Supermarket.
Emily King: 31:12
Yeah, exactly. So I think you know, I think there's a lot to be said for learning from each other as well, and learning by doing yeah.
Kirsten Diprose: 31:23
And that self-directed learning, and you can do that in a group too. But I love that idea of just being able to call up, because in farming it's often you feel like you're the only one with this problem or the only one that's kind of doing it this way, and so you need some specific advice, but then you find out that there are other people that are also trying to do this, and having that person that can say, oh, you should speak to, so-and-so, you know they're trying this or they've done that, and that's how you keep growing, I think in farming and that's how you keep growing, I think, in farming.
Emily King: 31:59
So half of my job is honestly linking people up with other people who can help them or have a similar issue or have experienced the same thing and have found a way to overcome it. So farming is often a very solitary job and so I think it often does feel a lot like you're the only one experiencing it and you're on your own and you know it's a big issue. But so often other people, everyone's got different ways of doing things and different ways of skinning the cat, but so often so many people are facing the exact same issue as you. I mean I think, yeah, just having a chat about it, you know, just ringing one of the neighbours or, you know, having a chat to someone, or even you know, as I say, give AWI a call and see if we've got anything to assist with it.
Kirsten Diprose: 32:38
Emily, thank you so much for joining us on Ducks in the Pond. Thank you, thanks very much for having me. I've got your phone number, so look out I might call you with my next wool-related question.
Emily King: 32:47
Please do, please do, you'll regret it.
Kirsten Diprose: 32:58
Yeah, I might. No, I'd love to hear from you, be great. I'll leave your number in the show notes now and that's it for this episode of Ducks on the Pond. Thank you to Emily King, the National Extension Manager at Australian Wool Innovation, and thank you to RIST Rural Industries Skill Training for this collaboration series. Rist is based in Western Victoria but provides training programs across Australia. There's a link in the show notes and I'll be back next week with an exciting bonus episode featuring Catherine Marriott about advocacy in agriculture, tackling those big, complex issues. I'm really excited to bring that one to you. I'll speak to you soon.
