The Future of Australia’s Dairy Industry
Following on from the highly rated ‘Skimming the Cream’ forum in Brisbane on the 9th of February, members of the Young Dairy Network and SubTropical Dairy groups reconvened to consider the impacts of Climate Change on the dairy sector in Australia using the high-impact ‘Accelerated Scenarios process’. The ‘2030 Dairy Scenarios’ brought together the members of the YDN and SubTropical groups using the core issues raised by the almost 100 farmers and industry representatives at the Skimming the Cream forum to consider what changes might emerge in the sector in coming years.
More importantly, the dairy industry representatives building the scenarios were tasked to not only consider what the future might look like given a whole range of competing demands, they also had to generate some key strategic initiatives open to the industry as it adapts to change.
Process facilitator, Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber stated from the outset that ‘…the purpose of exploring the potential futures in more detail and with greater depth is so that we can identify what actions we can take to both mitigate our risks and capture opportunities we can see in the Dairy Industry. Generating these scenarios is tied explicitly to a series of pragmatic ‘robust’ actions that can be undertaken on farms across Australia’.
From over 120 concerns and issues raised at the ‘Skimming the Cream’ forum, members at the two day scenario workshop selected a dozen or so key issues, with two core issues identified: The degree of industry regulation emerging from Government attention to Climate Change; and the level of consumer engagement with traditional dairy products.
These two core ‘drivers of change’ enabled the groups to create four connected though differing views of a potential future dairying landscapes: ‘a world in which there is high government regulation with high consumer engagement with dairy products; a world in which there is minimal government regulation with low consumer engagement with dairy products; a world in which there is high government regulation with low consumer engagement with dairy products; and a world in which there was low government regulation with high engagement with dairy products.
These four ‘potential futures’ provided the opportunity for farmers and industry people to answer the question ‘If this was ‘your lot’ in life as a dairy farmer, what actions would be available to you in order for you to ‘succeed’ at some level?’ The four scenarios and various actions provided some great insights into both the emerging challenges within the industry as well as the options for action available to various parts of the sector.
The results of the scenarios are being rolled out across dairy farming communities from the mid coast of NSW to the upper reaches of QLD. For further information contact Viv McCollum, program coordinator.
For questions related to the Accelerated Scenarios process, contact Marcus Barber
For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…
Read More >I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…
Read More >One of the reasons I founded The Australian Strategic Planning Institute was to ensure that high quality futures perspectives were included in the Strategic Planning process. Typically they were not which meant too many businesses and organisations were planning for futures that just would not exist as expected, meaning wasted resources and sometimes and marked…
Read More >As Victorian edges its way into a new drought phase and plays catch up to other parts of the country, I’ve been pushed to remember an article I wrote about our then State Government’s push to get people to reduce the length of their showers. The Four Minute Shower was an attempt to highlight just…
Read More >Sometimes when you look at enough assorted pieces of information a clear pattern emerges. In a previous role I was tasked with looking at the Future of Education, a topic I delved deeply into for almost 3 years. And in 2003 in a piece titled ‘The Future of Commercial Education’ I predicted that by 2015,…
Read More >Tomorrow I’ll be at the State Library of Victoria as part of the #V21 Digital Summit. In my futurist, pragmatist role I’ll be presenting few ideas about why ‘Your Future is NOT an App’, then later in the day facilitating an onstage debate about Disruption’s role in Innovation. And if it is anything to go…
Read More >I’ve been having a think lately about whether the use of Interest Rate movements by the Reserve Bank is actually too clumsy an instrument for effective economic management. The potential weakness has emerged only in recent times as the signs of a world-wide economic melt down have begun to expose one of the limitations of…
Read More >There’s a few problems with the successful leadership lists that bounce their way around the internet. In my opinion they lack context – the reality check that only comes by having a full appreciation of an individual organisation’s particular circumstances. Unfortunately many of these lists of ‘required leadership behaviours’ offer shallow quick fix advice that…
Read More >There’s no doubt that coal has a legitimacy problem with large swathes of the public around the world. Once a darling of energy and still in relative abundant supplies, Coal provides significant levels of energy per gram consumed. Yet the end outcome is now known to be incredibly harmful to localised communities needing to breathe…
Read More >At almost every stage in a shift in the way societies and organisations operate, there comes a period of extreme ‘unsettled-ness’. This period may show itself in the form of the doldrums (where things seem unusually calm but nothing seems to be happening) or in busyness (where there’s lots of activity but nothing seems to…
Read More >