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Context: Social aspects of livestock farming systems, including farm workforce and how work is organised, have received less research attention than the biophysical and technological aspects. This constrains understanding of social challenges to the sustainability of livestock systems, such as farm labour shortages, farmers' overwork, the undesirability of farming careers, workforce and skills changes linked to new technologies, and the connections of all these to farm performance and profitability. Aims: We introduce and test the applicability and utility in the Australian context of a method developed in France for assessing work organisation: The Work Assessment Method (WAM). The WAM goes beyond standard labour productivity metrics, such as total labour cost or livestock units per worker, to examine different types of work (routine, seasonal), who does the work (owner–managers, employees, contractors) and how these change seasonally. A measure of social sustainability ('calculated time available') is a key feature. Methods: We conducted the first Australian trial of the WAM on two Victorian dairy farms. Through facilitated discussions between participating farmers and the research team, we evaluated the utility of the method, and identified requirements to adapt it for larger, pasture-based dairy systems. Key results: The WAM was applied successfully on the pilot farms, despite differences in farm systems between France and Australia. The method characterised in detail the sources of overwork for each farm, enabling discussion of how the social sustainability and overall performance of the farms could be improved. The participating farmers reported that the method provided insights that were not available from current financial and physical analyses. Conclusions: The WAM shows potential for supporting farmers, advisors and researchers in work aimed at improving farm social sustainability and profitability, but requires adaptation to suit Australian conditions. A larger exploratory study applying the WAM on additional dairy farms, and on mixed farms, is suggested. Implications: This study provides a strong foundation for further research to develop the WAM as a useful research and advisory tool for Australian livestock production systems. Farmers, advisors and researchers need better methods for analysing farm work, to address challenges affecting the social sustainability and profitability of livestock farming. We report results from the first Australian trial of a method developed in France for assessing farm work organisation: The Work Assessment Method. Participating farmers reported that the Work Assessment Method provided insights not available from standard physical and financial analyses and the study provides a foundation for research to further develop the Work Assessment Method for Australian livestock production systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in innovation studies suggests that appropriate starting conditions are required if alignment of research to practice and policy is to be enabled. To achieve this alignment, a scoping exercise is required and must involve those people and institutions that have an interest in the research. This paper describes a consultation process to develop aBlueprint for Regional Water Productivityin Australia through a new research initiative at the University of Melbourne. This Blueprint was developed through a two-stage consultation project in which opportunities and constraints for system innovation in regional water productivity in Australia were identified and discussed with key stakeholders without pre-empting research or development questions. In this paper, we ask: Did this consultation process constitute a platform for innovation in research practices? In addressing this question, we describe this process and suggest that it constituted a fledgling platform for innovation in research practices characterised by new social arrangements, material exchanges and the discursive object of `innovation systems'. However, the potential for institutional change from this platform will depend on continued deliberation between water sector actors in new routines of research-development practice, and collective action through the formalisation of new partnerships between researchers, practitioners and policy-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food is produced in material places: distinct combinations of landform, soil, climate, hydrology and biota. However, agricultural landscapes are more than material, they are also social. Biophysical materials interact with phenomena including communities of place, and the wider economic, political and social context, to produce particular practices and arrangements of food production. The sociologically informed concept of place-making has recently been introduced to sustainability science, with the suggestion that it can assist in identifying practical pathways towards more sustainable landscapes, through offering insight into this variety of relations between the physical and the social. Here, we apply this perspective to a case study of an Australian rural community of place that is grappling with questions surrounding the future of its farm land. We have used 'community sustainability' as a conceptual entry point for exploring how landscape development trajectories result from discursive place-frames that draw on different sets of place-making relations. In this case, the relations that reproduce a broadly 'productivist' trajectory in landscape change are strong, but under some pressure, most evident in community perceptions of the relative unattractiveness of traditional farming livelihoods to a younger generation. However, place-making relations that might lead in alternative directions are weak. Incremental change towards a more diverse agricultural landscape appears possible if different economic and discursive relations can be drawn on to create a different place-frame that offers an equivalent promise for maintaining community in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]