Developing free training for farm advisors: Our Land and Water -Toitū te Whenua, Toiora te Wai supports professionals in their work with farmers
The Challenge
Our Land and Water – Toitū te Whenua, Toiora te Wai is one of 11 National Science Challenges funded by MBIE and hosted by AgResearch. Its mission is to preserve the most fundamental treasures of Aotearoa – its land and water – while producing value from those same treasures. A key area of investment is providing resources to farm advisors, who play a crucial role in guiding farmers toward more sustainable practices.
Farmers rely heavily on farm advisors to deliver the latest information, tailored to their specific farm and business needs. The resources that Our Land and Water have created empower farm advisors to do just that. However, with the government deciding to discontinue funding for National Science Challenges, they faced a pivotal challenge: how to ensure that their invaluable research and resources continued to make a difference?
Our Land and Water needed a solution to preserve their legacy and keep their extensive resources relevant and accessible. They aimed to provide easy-to-navigate training for farm advisors on three critical topics. The challenge was to connect their wide range of existing resources into cohesive learning resources that offer a structured way to digest the information, highlighting the most important parts.
Our Partnership
Our Land and Water knew they had many great and engaging resources, including infographics and interactive tools. They understood the need to connect these resources into easy-to-navigate training materials for farm advisors. They needed someone to collaborate with them to understand their problems, needs, and goals, and to provide a solution that effectively addresses these.
We were thrilled to partner with Our Land and Water to tackle this challenge. It was exciting to transform their goals into impactful learning modules that effectively meet their objectives. Through a journey of innovation and collaboration, we worked closely with Our Land and Water to understand their needs and the unique challenges they faced. Our approach combined thorough research, creative prototyping, and a co-design process, enabling us to develop and execute a solution that exceeded their expectations.
The result was the creation of three engaging learning modules that told a cohesive story, each designed to train farm advisors on a critical area as identified by Our Land and Water:
- Management Practices to Improve Water Quality – Help support farmers in creating cost-effective freshwater environment plans using science from Our Land and Water.
- Tools for Making Land Use Change Decisions – Providing farm advisors with tools to help farmers make informed decisions about land use diversification.
- Communicating Effectively with Farmers – Enhancing the communication skills of farm advisors to better connect with and listen to farmers.
“We could see the potential and need to walk farm advisors through the key resources produced through our eight years of research. But I was daunted by the size of the task – how do you start, with over 900 resources to choose from? How to choose what to put in, and what to leave out, and how to engage people to learn science in a way that feels relatable and practical? The team at Synapsys walked us through a highly collaborative process of module development, creating activities and exercises that brought home the learning in a practical and accessible way. We are getting great feedback on the modules, and they’re a legacy I’m proud to have been part of creating.”
Annabel McAleer, Our Land and Water - Toitū te Whenua, Toiora te Wai
The Impact
The modules are hot off the press, having been just launched! We are incredibly excited about the impact they will have. These learning modules will allow learners to access and work through them at their own pace, and the open-source approach ensures that Our Land and Water’s amazing research continues to be utilised, driving forward the efforts to support change in the primary sector.
We are so excited about the potential of this project to make a significant impact on the future of the primary sector in New Zealand. Ensuring that the best science continues to contribute to the country’s environmental and agricultural goals is a mission Synapsys is proud to be part of.