The Drought Resilience Information and Knowledge Sharing (DRINKS) program is a peer-to-peer learning approach that helps producers strengthen whole-farm decision-making across the drought cycle.
Developed by the Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub and Cam Nicholson of Nicon Rural Services, the approach supports producers to map seasonal farm activities and examine how key decisions change across four climate phases: good times, uncertain periods, drought and recovery.
In South Australia, the SA Drought Hub has adapted the DRINKS process to help producers identify important decision points, reflect on past experiences and plan for different seasonal scenarios before they are under pressure.
Learn more here.
Project description:
Through facilitated peer-to-peer workshops, producers map their seasonal farm activities, identify key decision points and consider the factors or trigger points that influence those decisions. The process encourages producers to think ahead about how their management may need to change under different conditions, rather than waiting until they are under the pressure of drought.
In South Australia, the SA Drought Hub has adapted DRINKS to suit local farming systems and incorporated the process into its Early to Mid Career Farmer program. This has enabled producers to identify areas where they want to strengthen their skills and confidence, while helping the Hub and delivery partners better target future training and extension activities.
Key achievements and results:
Phase 1 of DRINKS has now been completed in South Australia, with six workshops delivered across different farming regions involving grain, livestock and mixed farming businesses. Each workshop brought producers together to map seasonal activities, identify important business decisions and consider how those decisions change across good seasons, uncertain periods, drought and recovery.
The workshops showed that decision-making becomes more frequent, complex and constrained as seasonal conditions deteriorate. A consistent finding was that the challenge for many producers is not necessarily access to information, but having the confidence to interpret that information and make timely decisions for their own business. Early and proactive decision-making was identified as an important feature of more resilient farming systems.
The process also highlighted a need for producers to more clearly identify and document the trigger points they use when making decisions. Many participants relied on experience, gut feel or informal rules of thumb for decisions such as selling livestock, purchasing feed or changing management strategies. Future work will further explore triggers including rainfall, feed thresholds, livestock condition, soil moisture and market signals.
Peer-to-peer discussion was a key strength of the process. Producers valued comparing how others approached decisions around feed, fertiliser, stocking rates, grain marketing, machinery investment, pasture management and cash flow, including conversations around risk and trigger points that were not always discussed within their existing networks.
DRINKS was also used to identify training priorities for Early to Mid Career Farmer groups, including financial and cash flow management, grain marketing, containment feeding, livestock decisions, variable rate technology, yield prediction, soil management and improving business profitability.
Phase 1 has produced decision maps for grains, livestock and mixed farming systems, with the findings and opportunities identified through the workshops compiled into a DRINKS Phase 1 report, which will be released soon. Further work will expand the approach into additional industries, develop greater understanding of farm decision trigger points and explore links with the RiskWi$e approach to decision-making under uncertainty.
Read the recent SA Drought Hub media release here.
Project Images
