Uncertainty about the possibility of acquiring land can be rather large in the EU for sectors like dairy farming. Farm-level investment decisions are commonly made ex-ante when the farmer is not certain about the possibility of purchasing land. This possibility is realized only in a future...

In order to stimulate organic farming governments generally use a mix of temporary hectare payments and provision of public services for stimulating the development of the organic sector. In this paper a conceptual model is developed for determining a socially optimal hectare payment for any...

Groundwater has the characteristics of commonly owned property, and its use is likely to be inefficient in the absence of regulation. Several management tools can be used to regulate groundwater withdrawals, with no one tool dominating the others in terms of efficiency of water use. However, the...

A theory of settlement planning focussing on village-level production services is presented, and settlement plans are compared. The analysis draws on the modern theory of local public goods. Conditions for optimal level of services and optimum settlement size are derived, together with rules of...

The well-known Allais paradox is reformulated as a daily farm decision problem. Only 26% of the farmers exhibit violations of the expected utility hypothesis. Moreover, the tendency for violation decreases with the farm operator's education, experience and family size. No effects of the farm...

A theoretical framework is developed to study the effects of socioeconomic factors on farmers' risk attitudes and production decisions. No maintained assumptions about the individual's utility are required. A key element in this framework is the categorization of socioeconomic factors by their...

The study investigates the value of additional information on the response function to soil salinity of a given crop (potatoes), with regard to a stochastic long-run optimization model for utilization of saline water in a single-farm framework. The analysis provides a conceptual and...

Perennial crops require substantial initial investment in groundwork and planting, as well as a multiyear gestation period without commercial yield. Therefore, a crop's cycle (from planting to felling) should be long enough in order to cover the fixed cost and become profitable. The problem...