The advisory role and changes in agricultural information

Following the recent paper by Palmer in Aslib Proceedings in which she discussed the changes taking place in agricultural information, this paper discusses the effect of recent government policy on personal advisory work. It seeks to demonstrate that state advisers and private consultants exhibit similar information‐related behaviour and share a relatively small clientele. Pressures of commercialisation on the public sector will increase competition which will be to the detriment of the public service as it will be unable to provide advice of the same intensity or quality as private consultants who can devote all of their time to their, relatively few, customers.