Conditions for the dairy industry in northern Victoria over the past decade have been tough. High prices for feed inputs, especially when combined with low farmgate milk prices, have seen situations where dairy farmers are losing money feeding cows. In this environment, it is natural to consider...

A new era of water scarcity has changed past patterns of feeding dairy cows in northern Victoria. This paper derives a model for estimating least-cost feeding of dairy cows under a range of assumptions regarding prices for irrigation water, hay and feed grain. The cost-minimisation is subject to...

Efforts to document government support benefiting specific sectors or industries have so far paid scant attention to support given to the non-energy minerals sector. In this paper the issue of support for this sector is explored by way of a case study of Australia, a leading producer and...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional economic impacts of a prolongedperiod of recurrent droughts. The model used for analysis is TERM-H2O, a dynamicsuccessor to the bottom-up, comparative static TERM (The Enormous RegionalModel). We concentrate on the regions of the southern...

Australia has an incredibly variable and unpredictable hydroclimate, and while irrigation is designed to reduce risk, significant uncertainty remains in both seasonal water availability (‘allocations’) and irrigation crop water requirements. This paper explores the nature and impacts of...