Reports

Industry analysis and essays from AgMap, free to read and share. Data reports are built on public data, with sources cited so every figure can be checked.

Vegetable farms have the biggest labour bill in agriculture, and no machine anywhere picks at commercial scale.

Dr Thomas Lines · August 2026

Hands and Heads

Which farm costs AI could actually replace, industry by industry

Machines do physical work; language models do knowledge work. ABARES farm survey data measures both: paid labour runs from 9% of cash costs on grain and beef farms to 31% on vegetable farms, and paid advice from $580 a year on the average beef farm to $10,100 on the average grain farm. Four charts on what that means for each industry, and on why the working machines have arrived where the least labour is.

Read the data

Seven RDCs published a portfolio-level adoption figure in 2021. By 2025, none did.

Dr Thomas Lines · August 2026

The RDC Decade

Ten years of annual reports from all fifteen rural research and development corporations

Every annual report from all fifteen of Australia's rural R&D corporations, FY2015-16 to FY2024-25, standardised into one dataset of 150 reports. Research spending, extension spending, and what happened to the sector's only shared measure of adoption after October 2021. An interactive explorer: every chart has a table view, and every gap is a year an organisation printed no number.

Explore the data

A farm may not have one agricultural neighbourhood. It may have many.

Dr. Joseph Marks · August 2026

A Long Look Over a Short Fence

Rethinking the idea of neighbours in Australian agriculture

Farming knowledge has always moved over fences: a conversation at the gate, a look at what the neighbour is doing differently. An essay on what makes a neighbour useful in the first place, and why the most relevant experience for a question might sit in the next district, another state, or another country.

Read the essay
Chart from The Extension Gap

Dr Thomas Lines · August 2026

The Extension Gap

Twenty years of ABARES data on research and extension funding in Australian agriculture

Australia's agricultural R&D funding reached $3.0 billion in 2024-25, up 37% in real terms over twenty years. Public funding for extension and advisory services fell 60% over the same period. This report works through the ABARES data behind both numbers: who pays now, who does the work, and why the layer that carries research onto farms keeps losing ground.

Download the report (PDF)

Questions about a report, or data you would like to see covered? tom@agmap.org