In the main, Australian agricultural economics has been in the background in the recent trend toward convergence of research and farming practice which has become known as Farming Systems Research (FSR). However, the inherent importance of good economic performance of farms suggests that FSR...

Cereal residues represent a major resource for livestock feeding during the dry season in southern Africa. When kept on the soil surface instead of feeding them to livestock, crop residues can contribute to increasing soil fertility and maintaining crop productivity in the short- and the...

Dry sowing is the practice of sowing a crop into a dry seed bed before the autumn rains. This is in contrast with the traditional practice of wet sowing where seed is placed into a moist seed bed following a rainfall event in autumn. We evaluated the putative benefits and risks of dry sowing for...

This paper has been published in a peer-reviewed journal as: Kragt, M.E., Pannell, D.J., Robertson, M.J. & Thamo, T. (2012) Assessing costs of soil carbon sequestration by crop-livestock farmers in Western Australia, Agricultural Systems, 112: 27-37. DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2012.06.005

This study presents the use of a whole farm model in a participatory modelling research approach to examine the sensitivity of four contrasting case study farms to a likely climate change scenario. The newly generated information was used to support discussions with the participating farmers in...

In an era where the dominant implicitfarming policy has been ``get big or get out,''Titus Farms provides an exemplar to thecontrary. This paper explains the success storybehind a medium-sized 145-acre fruit andvegetable family farm in southeast Michigan.Using agroecosystems analysis, this case...

This paper examines the conditions that would be needed for a possible farming systems research project in the Region of Mopti (Mali) to have a significant production impact.