National Risk Management Initiative – Project Lead and Team

The National Risk Management Initiative (NRMI) is a GRDC project extending over five years that aims to understand and improve risk-reward outcomes for Australian grain growers through participatory action research (PAR).

Explicitly the NRMI aims to:

1. develop an improved understanding of the risk-reward relationships for important on-farm management practices and decisions,

2. inform growers and their advisers of new insights into managing risks and maximising rewards, and

3. challenge grower decision-making so future management decisions are thought of in terms of probability of upside returns offset against the associated downside risks.

In PAR, growers and their advisors will quantify the probabilities of uncertainty of outcomes and assess the risk-reward payoffs for given management decisions in the context of their own farming operations. At the conclusion of NRMI, a suite of extension packages and artefacts (decision support tools) will continue to inform and chnallenge grain growers, their consultants and advisers to consider farm management decisions as informed by probable rewards (profit $/ha) and associated probable risks (loss $/ha).

GRDC is seeking to engage a NRMI Project Lead (PL) and team to undertake national project leadership, to coordinate reporting to GRDC and to support up to twelve (12) Action Research Groups (ARGs) nationally. In addition, the PL is expected to:

(i) form an analytics team for biological, economic and risk-reward analysis,

(ii) form a behavioural science team to advise learning and practise change behaviours as well as investment impact, and

(iii) implement a national Theme on ‘Nitrogen Management Strategies’ that compares rewards and risks for approaches to managing Nitrogen supply for cereal, canola or other crops.