In 1962-63 a survey was conducted of forty-three dairy farmers in the Nambrok-Denison area of the Central Gippsland Irrigation District, near Maffra, in Victoria. One of the main purposes of the survey was to obtain estimates of resource productivities, using the Cobb-Douglas production function...

This paper discusses what economists want experimenters to do, and why, and criticises existing methods from the economists' viewpoint. The subject has received very little serious attention outside of North America and practically none, as far as I am aware, in Australia. The exception is a...

This paper deals with the problem of determining the optimum combination of sheep and beef cattle on grazing properties. A major difficulty is that iso-cost functions (production possibility curves) for sheep and cattle are unstable and difficult to estimate because of sheep-cattle-pasture...

In earlier papers on drought, sequences of wet and dry months were treated as realisations of binomial trials with periodic probabilities of failure (dry months), and the cost-revenue outcomes of alternative drought strategies were handled probabilistically. When costs and revenues may be...

A number of current policy issues are discussed which illustrate serious confusion and economic illiteracy in the minds of many influential farm leaders. The issues discussed are: the cost-price squeeze in agriculture; the embargo on the export of merino rams; promotion of farm products; land...