The Role of Farmers' Funding in an Interaction in the Australian Rural R&D Process

Australia is the world's front runner in farmer-driven R&D system reforms. Collective funding bodies operate on the farmers' levy, and they budget public R&D projects satisfying farmers' needs. This paper applies an innovation system perspective to explain how those funding bodies steer R&D at the following stages: project setup, project management, and farmer adoption. The behaviors of actors in the system, such as managers of the funding body (Meat&Livestock Australia Ltd., MLA), researchers, and extension officers are examined. The findings are as follows: (i) Effective interactions among actors are observed in the northern beef sector. (ii) MLA promoted and controlled the interaction by flexibly designing who and how to interact at each stage. (iii) From the interaction, MLA obtained local specific information, such as farmers' technical problems, researchers' abilities, and research progress, which served as a basis for steering R&D rightly.