Jess Jennings

APEN Award Winner

Agriculture and Rural Development, University of Western Sydney (Hawkesbury), Richmond, NSW 2753.
Email j.jennings@uws.edu.au

Keywords: Action Research, Participation, Extension, Dairy.

Reflections are made upon the experiences of the Profitable Pastures Project (PPP) conducted across the NSW dairy industry, based on personal experience from the perspectives of a PhD student observing the project and later as project coordinator. PPP initiated farmer-oriented extension based on action research methodology that is reported to have raised the profile and role that participating farmers played within their industry. Discussion is focussed on the value of facilitating learning process, farmer ownership of learning process, and the advantages of action research as an extension tool.

Media summary

This paper discusses the experiences, observations and reflections of an Action Research extension project conducted in the NSW dairy industry from 1999 to 2003. Farmer ownership of learning process, farmer participation and effective methods of facilitation and professional extension practice are explored.

Biosketch

Jess has academic qualifications to Honours level in both Economics and Econometrics from the University of New England, Australia, where he is now also pursuing an Arts degree in his spare time. Since graduating from New England Jess spent over two and a half years with the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), during which time he worked on Australian agricultural industry analysis at the state and national level that was quantitative and statistics based, including investigations into the adoption of technology in the Australian dairy industry. This work led Jess into the domain of qualitative research as a Dairy Australia PhD scholarship candidate and later co-coordinator of the NSW-wide Profitable Pastures Project. Jess is currently focused on developing contemporary extension methodology and applying relevant methods, specialising in Actin Research, to the area of Natural Resource Management through his consulting practice and associations with universities, extension and farming systems organisations, research centres and industry and farmers.