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AgMap Research

Ten years of RDC annual reports

Every annual report from all fifteen of Australia’s rural R&D corporations, FY2015-16 to FY2024-25, pulled into one dataset. 150 reports. Research spending grew about 18% in real terms across the eleven organisations that report it every year, and has been flat since 2018. Extension is harder to follow, because in October 2021 the one measure the whole sector reported against was dropped from the national priorities, and most of them stopped printing a number.

Dr Thomas Lines · AgMap · August 2026

I’m a startup founder and a researcher, and this is side work. Every figure comes from a published annual report and every chart has a table view, so check anything here against its source. With 150 reports and fifteen organisations reporting the same idea different ways, there will be mistakes. Tell me if you find one: info@agmap.org

Sector revenue, FY2024-25

$1.39bn

+21% real vs FY2016

all 15 organisations

Research expenditure, FY2024-25

$839m

real peak was FY2017-18

the 14 orgs that publish a figure

Extension program spending, FY2024-25

$54m

4.4% of sector expenditure

the 8 orgs that print one, each defining it their own way. Read it as a floor

Orgs printing any extension figure

8 of 15

research tagged as adoption: nobody since FY2022

down from 11 in the late 2010s

Who publishes an extension figure, year by year

One cell per annual report. Two different kinds of extension number turn up in these reports, they measure different things, so they get different colours.
What the colours mean
Program spending
A named program the organisation runs and calls extension or adoption, with a budget attached. The stricter of the two numbers, and usually much the smaller.
Share of research tagged as adoption
The slice of the research budget the organisation judged to be aimed at getting results adopted, reported against the government's priorities. Same money as the research line, counted a second way. A judgement, and always the bigger number.
Both published
Both numbers in the one report. They overlap, so adding them double-counts.
A percentage, no dollars
The orange judgement again, printed as a percentage with no dollar next to it, so the cell carries the percentage. It says how much of the research portfolio got tagged. Nothing about spending, and no denominator printed to work it out.
Nothing published
No extension or adoption figure anywhere in the report. Blank means unreported, and says nothing about what was spent.
2015-162016-172017-182018-192019-202020-212021-222022-232023-242024-25AgriFuturesAMPCAustralian EggsAustralian PorkAWICRDCDairy Australia41%39%FRDCFWPAGRDCHort Innovation19%15%15%9%26%14%LiveCorpMLA26.7%37%SRAWine AustraliaOct 2021: adoption category removed from national prioritiesreports carrying a dollar10/1511/1511/1511/1511/1510/159/159/159/158/15

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

The other way extension gets counted

There is a national extension figure, and it comes from somewhere else entirely: the domestic support Australia notifies to the World Trade Organization, covering Commonwealth and state programs. RDC Commonwealth matching gets notified under research, so whatever the RDCs spend on extension lands in the wrong bucket and cannot show up here. Both panels run on the same scale so you can compare them. Adding them would be wrong, because each one misses what the other counts.

Always real, 2024-25 $. The Nominal / Real switch does nothing here.

Public extension and advisory services, as notified to the WTO0100200$200m$80mExtension program spending visible in RDC annual reports0100200$36m$54mpeak $240mAUD millions, real 2024-252005-062010-112015-162020-212024-25Financial year ending 30 June

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

The rise in the lower panel is a reporting artefact. The organisations behind it change every year, each defines extension its own way, and two of them (GRDC and MLA) started printing much larger lines mid-decade. Deflators differ too, ABS CPI for the RDC line and ABARES’ own for theirs, so compare shape and order of magnitude and leave the arithmetic alone. Dashed segments are years ABARES marks as forecast. Source: ABARES, Agricultural R&D investment in Australia, 2024-25 update (December 2025).

Public research funding held up. Extension fell 60%.

Same ABARES release, indexed so both lines start at 100 in 2005-06. Public agricultural R&D funding finishes at 109, so in real terms it is roughly where it was twenty years ago. Extension and advisory services finish at 40. That is the national backdrop the RDC decade sits inside.
  • Public agricultural R&D funding
  • Public extension and advisory
255075100125150Index, 2005-06 = 100Financial year ending 30 June109R&D40extension2005-062010-112015-162020-212024-25

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

Real 2024-25 dollars on ABARES’ own deflator, which is why the Nominal / Real switch does nothing here. Dashed segments are the two years ABARES marks as forecast. Total R&D funding including private money sits in the table view. Source: ABARES, Agricultural R&D investment in Australia, 2024-25 update (December 2025).

Applies to every chart below. Nominal is what each report printed. Real restates the lot in FY2024-25 dollars using ABS All groups CPI, FY average of quarterly index numbers (2011-12=100), rebased to FY2024-25. The disclosure matrix and the two ABARES cards above stay as they are.

Sector revenue vs expenditure

All 15 organisations, AUD millions. The gap that opens from FY2022 is the surplus era, and it is mostly GRDC (87.5% of the sector's ten-year cumulative surplus).
  • Revenue
  • Expenditure
02505007501,0001,2502015-162017-182019-202021-222023-24AUD millionsFinancial year ending 30 June

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

Research expenditure, balanced panel

The 11 organisations that publish a research figure in all ten years, AUD millions. Switch to real terms and the peak is FY2017-18, with FY2025 sitting 3.4% below it.
02004006002015-162017-182019-202021-222023-24AUD millionsFinancial year ending 30 June

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

Explore one organisation

Revenue, expenditure and research as lines, extension program spending as columns wherever the organisation printed one. A gap in a line means that report did not carry the figure. AUD millions.
  • Revenue
  • Expenditure
  • Research
  • Extension program spending
01002003004002015-162016-172017-182018-192019-202020-212021-222022-232023-242024-25AUD millionsFinancial year ending 30 June

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

Grains Research and Development Corporation. The financial columns are strong. Gaps: no extension program figure in 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20.

GRDC: the surplus era

Annual result as columns, total equity as the line, one AUD-million axis. The FY2020 deficit is the drought reserve doing its job. What follows is four straight years of banking between 30 and 48 cents in every revenue dollar, ending with equity at $913m, 3.1 times annual expenditure.
  • Surplus
  • Deficit
  • Total equity
02505007502015-162016-172017-182018-192019-202020-212021-222022-232023-242024-25AUD millionsFinancial year ending 30 June-$46m+$204mequity $913m

Swipe the chart sideways, or press Table for the numbers.

Research spend, organisation by organisation

Independent vertical scales, endpoint values in AUD millions. Blank stretches are years with no published research figure.
GRDCstatutory
193243
MLAindustry
88183
Hort Innovationindustry
78151
Dairy Australiaindustry
4257
FRDCstatutory
2543
AgriFuturesstatutory
1531
SRAindustry
2930
AMPCindustry
2429
AWIindustry
2526
CRDCstatutory
1817
Wine Australiastatutory
2015
Australian Porkindustry
87
Australian Eggsindustry
36
LiveCorpindustry
11
FWPAindustry
4

Read this before quoting anything

  • A gap is a missing number, rather than a zero. Which organisations stopped printing one, and when, is most of what this dataset is for.
  • The eight organisations still printing extension program spending each define it their own way, so treat the $53.9m total as a floor rather than a measurement. Program spending and research-tagged-as-adoption overlap, so adding them double-counts.
  • Four known basis breaks that will read as trends if you let them: MLA’s donor-company gross-up, GRDC’s FY2024 change to how it counts extension, AWI’s FY2017 break, and Hort Innovation’s FY2015 part-year stub.
  • Real figures use the ABS All groups CPI, financial-year average, rebased to FY2024-25. The two ABARES cards are the exception: they arrive already real on ABARES’ own deflator, which is why they are pinned to real terms and why the gap between an ABARES line and an RDC line is not a quantity worth computing.
  • Extension figures do turn up outside the annual reports. Forward budget plans still carry extension lines, Hort Innovation’s per-fund reports carried one for two years, and CRRDC printed a single sector total of $117.36m for extension, adoption and commercialisation in March 2026. All of it unaudited, none of it on a shared basis, and no series you can follow across years.

Built from the 150 annual reports published by Australia's fifteen rural research and development corporations, FY2015-16 to FY2024-25. Every figure is cross-checked against the same number as restated in the following year's report.