The aims of our paper are to identify economic determinants of the on-farm cultivars diversity and to empirically characterize the farmers' diversification choices. We focus on the private decision making process involving the choice of rice cultivars and the corresponding allocation of...

The wine industry in New Zealand has been maturing over the past few decades, with consumers becoming more sophisticated and wineries responding by increasing their production of premium varieties. In addition, there have been several legal changes and subsequent changes to the distribution and...

Animal welfare considerations are becoming increasingly important for producers of animal-derived agricultural products. Recent media attention on issues of housing conditions for intensively reared livestock and induced calving in dairy production make it clear that some members of the public...

NPV and LEV are established and common approaches to valuing single rotation and infinite rotation forests respectively, when the rotation age is fixed in advanced. More recently, Real Options approaches have been employed to value single and infinite rotation forests with a flexible harvest...

This paper explains a short term forecasting approach that uses whole milk powder prices from Fonterra’s globalDairyTrade. The latter provides forward contract prices eight months out from each event. The cumulative impact of up to seven successive events provides reasonable expectations...

With current concerns about climate change and the general status of the environment, there is an increasing expectation that products have sustainability credentials, and that these can be verified. Labelling is a common method of communicating certain product attributes to consumers that may...

New Zealand primary sector industry approaches to industry-good investment, and the approaches to evaluation reported in the literature were reviewed to provide understanding of the key issues in ensuring such investments meet stakeholder needs. The extent to which planning and evaluation...

Conservation biological control (CBC) aims to improve conditions for natural enemies in agricultural landscapes and has the goal of reducing pest species below threshold level to thus avoid the need for synthetic chemicals. The CBC approach has been introduced in several counties, including New...

Policy decisions aimed at improving farm animal welfare involve balancing several competing objectives. Not only do such decisions involve tradeoffs between social, ethical, economic and welfare considerations, animal welfare itself is a multi-dimensional concept and some husbandry practices may...

Large quantities of fresh produce can be grown in the Highlands provinces of Papua New Guinea, and this produce is then marketed to a range of markets, including the coastal cities of Port Moresby and Lae. However, it is often argued that the marketing system performs poorly, and various reasons...