Returning home to her southern Riverina family property in her late-20s, Airlie Landale set herself the task of being her father's right-hand woman and to learn and immerse herself in their livestock and cropping business.
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The world of farming that opened up to her was exciting, challenging and multifaceted, and the need to balance complex business, financial, environmental, livestock, soil, pasture, human, climate and market risks on a daily basis, was quickly realised.
She understood that she must continuously learn, collaborate and improve in order to take charge of her future and make a positive impact on the farm.
"I tried my best to immerse myself in every learning opportunity I could get my hands on," Mrs Landale said.
"I was learning from Dad in the paddock and in the office, immersing myself in the physical and management work as much as possible.
"I was trying to attend every producer day or conference I could, but being isolated and busy on farm, it is impossible to upskill and learn constantly in this way."
Mrs Landale turned to a tool we can take anywhere - the internet.
Wanting to find information on a wide range of topics, including regenerative agriculture, sheep performance on different pastures, farm management and financial management software, trough designs, or to locate handy gross margin and budgeting tools, each night Airlie powered up her laptop and opened her search browser.
But, she found out quickly that being actively committed to learning and finding opportunity wasn't enough.
"What ensued was frustration and often a sense of overwhelm," Airlie said.
"The big mighty beast of the internet was not making it easy for me to continue to build my knowledge.
"I was frustrated, inefficient online and not getting the answers I needed."
Airlie realised there is so much knowledge in the agricultural industry, but it takes so much time to be find it, capture it, make sense of it and then garner some practical learnings from it.
Four years and multiple versions later, the Farm Table platform is a national, cross-sector integrated knowledge platform to connect producers to farming information, opportunities, and, to each other.
It is now one of the largest agricultural websites available in Australia.
The Farm Table is free for producers to access and to sign up and helps in a number of key ways.
The AgLibrary brings together thousands of resources from across Australia, and the world, and arranges the pieces in such a way that a farmer can start to build and grow their knowledge quickly and easily.
