Commercial feed blending is a complex process consisting of many potential raw ingredients and final products. The sheer number of daily orders and final products at a typical feed mill means that raw ingredients cannot be mixed to directly produce final products in an economical fashion. As a...

Aset of simulations were used to estimate the impact of improvements in cattle breeding efficiency and other management factors on gross margins in extensive pastoral systems in Western Australia. The simulations showed that gross margin was an increasing function of breeding rates, but age at...

Previous bioeconomic studies have mainly concentrated on beef operations, principally stocker activities, and rangeland conditions. These studies have assumed that the rancher determines some desired weight gain per head over a period, usually one year, and this weight gain is achieved by...

A set of simulations were run to estimate the impact on gross margins due to improvements in cattle breeding efficiency and other management factors in extensive pastoral systems in Western Australia. The output from the simulations was integrated into a statistical model of gross margin as a...

Seven different remaining value functions for tractors and harvesters were estimated using data from advertised prices for used farm equipment. The generalised Box-Cox model was used to nest six of the seven functions. The more complex Box- Cox function explained the data better, but simpler...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess farmers’ willingness to participate and pay for weather-based index insurance in the Upper East Region of Ghana, and what factors influence the participation and purchase of crop insurance schemes. Design/methodology/approach: A survey of 200...

Using stochastic frontier analysis, efficiency of production of wheat in WesternAustralia was studied. The production function model used was a relatively simpleinput model, consisting of wheat yield, effective rainfall, fertilizer application rates andyear of study. Inefficiency was captured in...

Irreversibility and uncertainty render the standard capital budgeting techniques such as net present value (NPV) analysis insufficient as a decision criterion. The standard NPV underestimates the value of the investment by not including the value of waiting for new information to reduce the...

For horticultural commodities, labor is necessary for post-harvest activities such as management, marketing, packing, and distribution. We create a model with pre- and post-harvest tasks and transportation network to study how a shortage in the pre-harvest labor market affects the post-harvest...

In July 1990 the New South Wales Dairy Corporation altered the regulations governing the transferability of market milk supply quotas. These changes allow producers to trade in milk quotas to suit their individual production patterns. In this study, a farm-level analysis of the effects of...