In late 2021 the Australian vegetable industry invested significant funds to develop a nationally coordinated, regionally delivered extension program known as VegNET. To design a sustainable extension system for a complex, national industry such as vegetables, significant time was invested. An agricultural innovation systems approach was developed to best support grower outcomes. Development and implementation of this system was very deliberate to incorporate the complexity of the system. 

In the 1950’s British cybernetician Ross Ashby, working on biological homeostasis, developed the concept of variety as a measure of the number of possible states of a system. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, as it became known, states that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system. 

The concept has since been understood to be suitable to describe other complex systems, such as human information networks and can inform extension systems exceedingly well. 

In this context, a viable extension system is one that has a repertoire of suitable, nuanced responses to the complexity the environment produces. 

Until recently organizations have worked to manage this complexity by reducing the variability of the environment. Simplifying extension models and reducing network complexity is an example of this.

The rise of information systems, and the density of interactions between agents in the agricultural ecosystem is orders of magnitude more complex than it was even 20 years ago. This increasing complexity has outmoded many extension models and has driven the development of Agricultural Innovation Ecosystems as current extension best practices. 

To develop a sustainable, future proof extension system for the vegetable industry, the complexity of the extension model must meet the information ecosystem. A networked, systems approach to extension was developed to increase the sophistication of extension without becoming unmanageable. The role of the extension professional in this extension network system is not to know everything. The role is to own the outcome for the grower. In this extension ecosystem the extension officer acts as a knowledge broker who knows how to provide the best information to the grower, in the most appropriate format, at the right time.