Dairy farms in China’s suburban areas have been playing an important role in providing urban markets with fresh milk. With the construction of dairy cattle concentration centres and more cows being driven to the concentration centres, small and scattered dairy farms are gradually disappearing...

This paper assesses the tradeoff between non-farm income and on-farm soil and water conservation investment by smallholder farmers in the semi-arid tropics of India using a dynamic bioeconomic model. This modeling approach allows understanding the complex interaction and feedback between...

The TOP-MARD project is a 3-year, 11 country, project supported by the EU’s Framework 6 Programme for Research and Technology Development1. The aim of the research project was to build a policy model of multifunctional agriculture and rural development which would link the multiple functions...

One of the critical success factors for the future development of the agri-food sector is the increased integration of enterprises and other stakeholders in horizontal and vertical ‘communities’. Tracking and tracing, agreements on quality policy, improvements in logistics, dissemination of...

We analyse the impacts of the CAP reforms on the technical efficiency of the crop farms. We use an output distance function and an inefficiency effects model which incorporates the influences of exogenous variables on farm efficiency. We formulate policy variables (e.g. the CAP subsidies) and...

While farmers have been recognised as one of the key sources of innovation, many studies on agricultural innovations continue to consider farmers as adopters of externally-driven innovations only. Based on cross-sectional data from 409 farm households, this study, in contrast, analyses the...

This study was an analysis of the input of human labour, tractive force and energy consumption in the model technologies of production of winter wheat, winter triticale, winter rye and sugar beets grown for bioethanol as well as reed canary grass, Virginia mallow, sorgo and maize grown for...

Research funders like ACIAR typically invest in activities across a spectrum including human capacity building in pursuit of economic, social and environmental benefits. Ideally they allocate their resources such that the returns from these activities at the margin are similar but information...