The structure of the agriculture sector in Australia appears to pose a fundamental constraint to 'product marketing' and 'value-adding' initiatives of the kind for which many are calling. A case is presented in this paper for the search for differentiation opportunities (as a rubric for product...

Public good objectives have, for many years, encouraged governments to target farmers with propositions for change to their production practices. Initially these propositions were attempts to accelerate the adoption of innovations that offered enhanced productivity. They have come to include...

Historically research about diffusion has largely been focused on rates of adoption and explanations for them. This is a matter of secondary importance, arguably, to the question of the likely total level of adoption. In the case of agricultural innovations total adoption can be expected to be...

Shrimp production in Thailand has historically been undertaken in the saline and brackish waters of coastal mangroves. In recent years rising demand and prices for shrimp and falling productivity of mangrove areas have motivated an expansion of shrimp production into the fresh-water margins of...

Sugar cane farms are the single biggest user of irrigation water in Queensland. Recent drought and unreliable rainfall patterns in areas traditionally reliant on rainfall for crop production has resulted in increasing interest in, and adoption of supplementary irrigation to help underpin...

South Australia’s Minister for Primary Industries, Natural Resources and Regional Development in 1996 delegated to an industry based Apiary Task Force the role to develop and implement a cost effective disease control strategy. Underlying this broad term of reference was the need to increase...

This paper seeks first to quantify the relative importance of the different factors contributing to growth in Australia’s wine industry over the ten years to 1996. This growth accounting exercise uses an economy-wide model for Australia that separately distinguishes nonpremium from premium red...

In this paper we review some recent studies of the impact of National Competition Policy on rural Australia. National Competition Policy has tended to assume that both domestic and international deregulation of industry leads to a shift from a noncompetitive to a competitive industry structure....

Central Queensland’s dryland farming systems are subject to high levels of climatic variability, are seen as being relatively risky and also suffering falling profitability due (in part) to the rapid decline of nutrient content and physical structure of soils. This suggests that many farming...