The paper demonstrates a group incentive program to encourage farmer adoption of best management practices. It is demonstrated that the best management practices may not actually reduce farm profits but may increase farm profits and reduce environmental pollution. This may bring about a win-win...

This paper identifies and synthesises strategic opportunities and challenges facing New Zealand’s sheep meat and beef sector over the next 10 to 15 years. A Delphi surveydraws on the sector’s collective knowledge and identifies areas of consensus anddivergence of opinion. Using the results...

Multi-Agent Simulation (MAS) models are intended to capture emergent properties of complex systems that are not amenable to equilibrium analysis. They are beginning to see some use for analysing agricultural systems. The paper reports on work in progress to create a MAS for specific sectors in...

The 2002 New Zealand Transport Strategy states that in the long run, economic development and transport activity need not be directly related. This implies that a degree of „decoupling‟ is required – that economic development needs to occur without similar growth in transport. Before...

Market-based instruments (MBIs) for resource management create financial incentives for people and businesses to use resources more efficiently, within a regulatory context designed to ensure that ecological, social and cultural objectives are also met. Three case studies were done to identify...

The understanding of how allocation decisions can maximise the economic returns to the community from water for irrigation has received little attention, but is a significant issue for regional councils, those interested in water allocation policy development, and for irrigated farmers. There is...

We used the well-being evaluation method, a technique for measuring individual utility, to study how people in the wildland urban interface of Colorado (USA) felt about their lives before and after two wildfire scenarios. Variables such as age, family size, fire frequency, and house value were...

In his numerous textbooks WILHELM BRANDES has laid the foundation for theoretically appropriate modeling of farm firms, which has recently been expanded to modeling sustainability goals. The published research results belong to the fields of economic, ecological, and social sustainability....

This paper presents findings on the use of HT corn and quality-adjusted herbicide use for 12 key corn producing states using a panel data set for 1986-2008. Our preliminary findings indicate an insignificant impact of HT corn on herbicide use, conditioning or accounting for HT corn with other...

The objective of this paper is to provide a framework of accounting to allow the evaluation and comparison of both conventional and traditional agriculture by accounting for both traditional market transactions and the environmental resources and changes in those resources. Even if a study...