Intro: This is a GRDC podcast.

00:00:12:13 - 00:01:07:28

Sally Maguire: Hello, I'm Sally Maguire. Victorian agricultural consultant, Cam Nicholson has a career spanning more than four decades, and over the years he's learned a lot. But mostly he spends his time passing on his knowledge to others. And that's one of the reasons Cam has received this year's GRDC "Seed of Light Award" in the South, which recognises the outstanding contribution, dedication and commitment of individuals communicating research outcomes to people working in the grains industry. I caught up with Cam to discuss the importance of head, heart, and gut when it comes to decision making and to see if he has any tips or advice for up-and-coming agronomists. You're a cattle and a sheep farmer based in Geelong in Victoria, but the work that you mainly do now directly benefits the grains industry. So tell me how you came to be working in the grains industry or with the grains industry?

00:01:08:02 - 00:01:57:09

Cam Nicholson: I've got an interesting pathway because I actually started nearly 40 years ago in soils, pastures and livestock and did that for my first 15 years. I never went near a crop for the first 15 years, and I was working in southwest Victoria primarily, and it was all livestock then. There was hardly any cropping at all. People put a few oats in, but that was about it and I'd been involved in some big livestock projects. There was one called triple P, which was all around grazing management, and then another one called Sustainable Grazing Systems. So big livestock type programs. And in 2003, I actually got the opportunity to get involved in a program called "Grain and Graze" that some people may recognize the name, and it really gave me an opportunity to be able to apply my grazing and my livestock skills in that mixed farming situation. So that's really how I sort of got into the grains industry.

00:01:57:17 - 00:02:04:23

Sally Maguire: Do you come from an agricultural background, or what's your personal story about your connection to agriculture?

00:02:04:25 - 00:02:39:22

Cam Nicholson: A bit like mainstream to cropping my folks were both off farms but large family, small farms. They ended up moving to Melbourne. So I actually grew up in Melbourne, but did agricultural science at university, and I sort of just had a background interest in it all. So I joined the ag department as soon as I'd finished my university course and my wife, her father had a small farm as well, and we sort of got involved in that, and we've just expanded that over time. So the sheep and cattle property that we run on the Bellarine Peninsula sort of evolved out of a small block that my father-in-law had many years ago.

00:02:39:27 - 00:02:44:03

Sally Maguire: The work that you do now, tell us, what does an average day look like for you?

00:02:44:10 - 00:03:27:04

Cam Nicholson: There's no average day, really. I seem to do a lot of talks and workshops. I do some lecturing at Marcus Oldham Farm Management College just out of Geelong, which is handy for me. So I do a fair bit with the final year farm management students there. So I tend to do a lot of talks and presentations. I've got far less farm clients than I used to have. I used to have a lot of farm clients many years ago. I used to do a lot of trials over the years in conjunction with Southern Farming Systems, which is a farming group in the south. I've got a small home office, so lots of flexibility and often doing things on the farm. So typical day could be farming in the morning and then office work in the afternoon, or off to see a client or going doing some lectures. So really mixed bag.

00:03:27:09 - 00:03:33:16

Sally Maguire: Tell me, what's your specific area of passion? What are the problems that you would like to be helping solve?

00:03:33:18 - 00:05:16:15

Cam Nicholson: I think all farming doesn't matter whether it's cropping or grazing or dairy or whatever else. There are some commonalities in it that separate what I'd consider to be the really top farmers from the rest of them. It's partly influenced by the soil type and the climate you've got. So basically where you farm and I always say this to the market students who actually buy soil type and climate and the rest of it's up to your management. But then it's how well your farm, whatever enterprise that is. Given the situation, given where you farm. And so how well do you apply best practice or what you might say better practice because it's always evolving. I think how will you understand risk and volatility? That's become a real passion of mine. Appreciating risk a bit better and making good decisions earlier and more often with that understanding of that risk. So I think that's important. And also I think we just need to recognise that farming is actually a high risk, potentially high reward job. We sometimes don't think of it that way, but it really is. It's a high pressure job. And so managing your mental health and making sure you can stay in a good headspace, we're always going to be under pressure in farming at certain times. We're going through one at the moment because it's terribly dry but trying to maintain a good headspace so you can make good decisions is pretty vital, and I'm always conscious as an advisor of two things. One is that no advice is risk free, so it doesn't matter what advice you give, there is some risk associated with that. And the other one, it's really easy to spend someone else's money and you can give advice to spend someone else's money but what I spend that money myself, if it was mine, they always go through in my head when I'm making any sort of recommendations.

00:05:16:18 - 00:05:33:21

Sally Maguire: So you are out there talking to farmers, obviously, as an agronomist, and it's been said that you're on the forefront of learning, providing the most useful, relevant agronomic and business management knowledge and then also affecting behaviour change. So how do you do that? How do you manage to stay on the front foot?

00:05:33:26 - 00:08:04:07

Cam Nicholson: Well, one, you've got to keep up with the science and the evolution of that. But having said that, there's lots of other people that are doing that as well. I think my role now has become a bit more helping farmers process that information or that opportunity or that technology and make it fit in their business. And there are a couple of things that evolved out of the "Grain and Graze" program, which are worth sort of touching on because one of them is around this idea of what I call the head, heart and gut of decision making, and that depending on your temperament or your personality, you'll either be strongly driven in your decisions by the head, which is sort of the facts and the calculations and the spreadsheets and all of those sort of things. And so very heavily on what the science is. But lots of people make decisions with the heart, which is your values, your beliefs, your preferences, those sort of things, your fears and your gut, which is your intuition. And different farmers that I've met over the years are largely driven by one of those three. They're just an instinct decision maker and what I've learned is if you can pick that and you can shape your message that talks more about what their intuition is telling them, you know what your gut tell you? What do you reckon we should be doing here - as opposed to bombarding them with science or vice versa, if they're very information and science focused, and they like all of that detail. I change it around and give them a lot of detail. And in that way, you're connecting with the way they operate and the way they go through and process their decisions. And so you shape your message accordingly. I was very fortunate I had a boss when I first started in the ag department, and he always said to me, you drive up the driveway to a farm slowly, not so you don't run over the family dog, but by the time you get to the back door, you should actually know the temperament of that farmer by looking around and looking at the way the farm looks and that always stuck with me. And there's some real value in being able to understand the farmer's temperament and temperament type, and whether they're a head, heart or gut decision maker, and then pitching it so that it resonates with them. It doesn't come overnight. It's taken me 40 years to get the hang of it, but it really does work. And I think that's one thing in agriculture that we need to particularly advisors need to learn that skill and have that flexibility in their messaging. I quite often see people that just stick to - there's one way of delivery, there's one message and that's it, and they just bombard it and then wonder why it doesn't resonate.

00:08:04:15 - 00:08:10:07

Sally Maguire: In your 40-year career - what are some of the big changes that you've seen in the industry?

00:08:10:09 - 00:09:22:24

Cam Nicholson: There's been some big changes with technology, some fundamental things you look back on now and you think, why on earth would I have done that 40 years ago? And if I go back to grazing - when we first started what was called a triple P program. Farmers used to set stock every paddock with livestock, and you'd have two year old wethers in this paddock for a year and throw your old wethers in this paddock for a year, and four year old wethers in this paddock for a year. We now know rotationally graze or graze and spell - we're far more flexible in livestock movements and you look at it and you think, well, that's just second nature. You look at the technologies of when we used to sow crops, to how we sow crops now. The technologies we've got with some of the sensor equipment and stuff like that is making some fundamental differences in how potentially we farm and make decisions. Having said that, I think there's a real challenge - there's a lot of tech out there that people are unsure of how to use that information. So you sort of get bombarded with information and feel like you need the latest tech but if it's not informing your decisions, then sometimes it can become more of a distraction than a benefit. So there's a bit of work that we need to get right on that but fundamentally, the farming system has changed a lot from 40 years ago to now.

00:09:23:00 - 00:09:30:06

Sally Maguire: So how do you advise people or how do you suggest that growers best go about meeting the challenges of modern-day farming?

00:09:30:13 - 00:11:44:20

Cam Nicholson: It comes back to the fundamentals that good farmers are good for a reason. It's not luck. It's because they do some things well and my observation is the best farmers make good decisions earlier and more often than the others. It's not that they have access to greater technology, it's not because they get more rainfall. It's not because they're necessarily their equities better and that's why they can do what they do. They do it because of their decision making. And it's something that's just become more and more evident to me those that make those good early decisions and do them more often separate themselves out from the rest of the pack. That's easier said than done. And so I've had a real interest over, particularly the last 15 or 20 years around decision making, which actually came from the "Grain and Graze" program, because we asked a question right at the start - how do you determine how much livestock and how much crop you might have in a mixed farming business? And that was a very complex decision that had lots and lots of elements and influences to it and that's where I really got into the theory of trying to understand decision making and how you make good decisions. So the behavior change follows from the decisions you make. You know, it sounds obvious, but that's the way it flows. We need to recognise that just because you make decisions all the time doesn't mean you're any good at making them. Sometimes when I give these sort of talks, I say, when were you taught to make a good decision? The same way you were taught to read and write or do maths? Making good decisions is fundamental to so much stuff we do and can make or break us. It's a skill. It can be taught, you can learn it, you can practice it, and you can become better at it. But we haven't really had much focus on that as a fundamental. We just assume that people can do it, and then within that, being able to have a process to make a good decision some people, as I said, will be more facts and figures driven in their decision. Other people will be more gut feel. You can fit both of those in if you've got some sort of a process and some sort of an understanding of how you make a decision, and I just observe more and more that I think we just assume people can make good decisions and I don't think that's right.

00:11:44:24 - 00:11:55:06

Sally Maguire: Risk is something that you speak about a lot and that factors into people's decision making. So have the risks involved in farming change significantly over the years?

00:11:55:09 - 00:13:49:08

Cam Nicholson: The fundamentals haven't. The two biggest fundamental risks we've got in agriculture is price and yield and yield, largely driven by climatic conditions. They may be changing a bit depending on how much you subscribe to the climate change, but that volatility has always been there. There was a great study done a good number of years ago now by the Australian Farm Institute, and they compared different sectors of the Australian economy for volatility and gross income. And agriculture was miles ahead of any other one, whether it's the mining sector or retail or the share market or any of those sort of things. So as sort of a sector farming, we're dealing with very high volatility. And then when they compared Australia's volatility to the rest of the world, we came out as number one. So basically Australian farmers are playing the riskiest game in town. And as part of The Grain and Graze work, we looked at the amount of information that we provided farmers on risk, and we do a pretty poor job at that, unfortunately. We talk a lot in averages, but an average will never cripple you. Now, if we've got average prices and average yields each year, the job would be pretty straightforward and far less stressful. The bottom line is we don't and we have to respond quite often very quickly to rapid changes in circumstance. And so that volatility in price and volatility in yield created by climate is something we have to sort of factor in and respond to, because it's the extremes where the risk lies. It's not in the average. But if you look at a lot of information in agriculture, it talks about the average. The average yield is this. Our average rainfall is this. We rarely get the average. And I think we can do better to help farmers in making their decisions by being better in the information we provide that has that understanding of how volatile or what range there is in the results that we may be getting.

00:13:49:10 - 00:13:52:20

Sally Maguire: Do you have any advice for up and coming agronomists?

00:13:52:22 - 00:14:23:02

Cam Nicholson: Well, probably alluded to it through this discussion, the what you might call what sometimes termed the softer side of extension and advisory, I think is something that could be done better and should have more focus on. And I think young agronomists should weigh that equally or put equal sort of value on it as they do the technical. And I know when I first started, it was all about the technical, you know, what herbicide does, what kills what weed, and is this species better than that species in this rainfall environment.

00:14:23:04 - 00:15:23:00

Cam Nicholson: So you need all that technical stuff. And I get that with younger agronomists that you want to be technically competent enough, but quite often that comes with not developing the same level of skill at the same rate on the softer side of understanding that - oh this farmer, just by the conversation we've had in the few questions I've asked, I can tell you're very much a gut feel type decision maker, or you're a very emotional decision maker, and therefore the information I want to get across, I just have to reshape the way I talk about that and tell that. So I think learning those skills is really, really important. And coming back to the decision making one, learning a few processes that can help them make good decisions. There's lots of really complex decisions we've got to make in farming, having just someone else that can help you think your way through. It doesn't have to be overly formal, but just knowing the right sort of questions to ask can be really useful as well. So those softer skills, I suppose, Sally are the ones I'm talking about.

00:15:23:06 - 00:15:35:10

Sally Maguire: Well, given that you don't have a crystal ball, what do you see as the future of the grains industry in Australia? What do you think it looks like I guess some of the challenges and some of the things that we're winning at.

00:15:35:12 - 00:17:02:26

Cam Nicholson: I think it's really bright because of the opportunity we've got. I think our biggest challenge, if I put the volatility bit aside that I mentioned earlier, because I think that volatility potentially could get greater. I think the sustainability side of it, and that's a word that some people sort of shudder when they hear. But I think this ability to be able to continually grow high yielding crops with less reliance on some of the inputs that we're currently needing to use. I think it's something that will be a challenge for the industry going forward. We've bought some big yields and we're getting some big yields, but those big yields are often based on a lot of inputs. That is associated with a lot of cost and a lot of cost when your returns can be crawled right towards the end, whether it's a late frost or a wet harvest or whatever it might be, means that we're upping the risk in the business, not necessarily upping the margin enough. And so I think the industry has got to think of some clever ways of how some of those key inputs could be managed through a range of different options, rather than just manufactured fertiliser or certain herbicides, certain groups of herbicides and so on. So things like crop rotations, I think, are going to be far more important in that whole scheme to help manage that volatility and risk and achieve the sort of outcomes the nitrogen, the weed control, the soil outcomes that we want.

00:17:09:18 - 00:17:31:04

Sally Maguire: That was Cam Nicholson, Victorian agricultural consultant and recipient of this year's 'Seed of Light Award' in the southern region. More information on this topic can be found in the description box below or online at grdc.com.au I'm Sally Maguire. This has been a GRDC podcast. Thanks for listening.