Ricecheck, an extension program for rice developed by the NSW Department of Primary Industries, is based on eight best management practice recommendations (“key checks”) considered essential for achieving high yields. The program comprises grower meetings and field days. The Ricecheck...

Slowing productivity growth in the Australian grains industry has led to calls for increasing investment in rural R&D to advance agricultural technology. However, recent research also suggests there is strong potential to increase productivity by enhancing uptake of existing innovations. The...

We analyse how and to what extent land infrastructure affects productivity and profitability of High Yielding Variety (HYV) Boro rice production in Bangladesh. In our study, “land infrastructure” refers to some basic physical characteristics and facilities of farmland such as farm size, land...

Improving farm productivity is often touted as essential for the future prospects of Australian agriculture, particularly for the export-oriented broadacre farm sector. This paper draws on farm panel data for the period 2002 to 2011. The annual components of productivity of the same group of 223...

We present a new Bayesian econometric speci…cation for a hypothetical Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) incorporating respondent ranking information about attribute impor- tance. Our results indicate that a DCE debrie…ng question that asks respondents to rank the importance of attributes helps...

Governing the cooperatives’ management by payment systems turns out to be a non-trivial problem due to the specific characteristics of the legal structure. Evaluating the management’s performance is complicated by the business relations between members and their cooperative. A relative...

The WTO negotiations on agriculture remain deadlocked after four years of discussion, and efforts to find a solution at Cancún failed. Analysis shows that the recent draft Cancún text offers more flexibility than earlier proposals, and such flexibility most likely implies a lower level of...

This study introduces two advances to the aggregate productivity index methodology typically employed by ABARES. First, it accounts for the effects of climate variability on measured productivity by matching spatial climate data to individual farms in the ABARES farm surveys database. Second, a...

Recent analyses of the possible adverse effects of climate change on agriculture in developing countries have raised food security concerns, especially for farm households whose crop productivity is expected to fall. The present study uses the GTAP global economy-wide model to capture at the...

This paper examines broadacre farm performance in south-western Australia. This region has experienced pronounced climate variability and volatile commodity prices over the last decade or so. Relationships between productivity and profitability are explored using panel data from 50 farms in the...