It's been my experience that a lot of seeming mysteries are solved only by the person with the mystery talking to the right person. And the right person could be anyone with an observation.

It happens in Engineering all the time too, where you talk to the one user in ten-thousand who happens to have a keen eye for the exact sequence of events on the display, and their careful recitation of the sequence of frames on the display is enough for you to piece together the system state at the time of a failure.

It's rare that engineers talk to users, and it's probably equally rare for environmentalists to talk to individual farmers looking for information.