In this article a mathematical model is presented to assist management decisions on an integrated crop and livestock farm. Risk is incorporated into the model as the negative deviation of the actual gross income from the expected value of an activity's gross income. The model includes crop...

Hail insurance is provided by the private sector in South Africa but crop insurance (drought insurance) programmes, after a promising start, failed to attract customers. A crop insurance programme (drought) for small-scale commercial farmers, who are not yet paying tax, has been recommended to...

The experimental method of measuring risk attitudes, using four hypothetical gambling situations, was used to elicit information from peasant farmers in the Border region of South Africa. The main intention was to examine peasant farmers’ attitudes towards risk and the social and economic...

This study analyses the importance and dimensions of risk sources and computer adoption among farmers in a changing economic policy and trade environment. A survey was conducted in 1996 among 112 commercial farmers in KwaZulu-Natal. The majority of respondents were in favour of a liberalized...

The sugar industry is an important contributor to the South African (SA) economy, with average annual production estimated at 2.5 million tons of sugar. This study aims to quantify actual use of management instruments by a sample of commercial sugarcane farmers in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) that are...

The objective of this paper is to study the effect of agricultural policies on marketing decisions as well as the link between marketing and production decisions. We develop an analytical model to study how policies affect marketing decisions and conditions under which the two types of decisions...

Modern animal production has been criticised for the lack of animal-friendly production practices. The goal of this paper is to examine how animal welfare could be improved in pig fattening by providing producers with extra incentives. The focus is on three preventive and one mitigative...

Risk management and income stabilization have been gaining increasing attention in the EU’s agricultural policy debate, also in connection to the recent proposal of a specific package of measures hypothesized in the ongoing CAP reform. The paper summarizes the current policy picture at EU and...

Foot and Mouth disease, like other epizootic outbreaks, can have wide and lasting impacts exceeding the agricultural field. Within Europe various ad hoc policies exist to cope with these consequences. In this paper we develop a dynamic CGE model allowing us to simulate a FMD outbreak, its...

Three specific aspects of agricultural risk management are addressed 1. Recent developments in price volatility and yield risk 2. The role of policy: - Subsidized crop insurance with examples from the massive US program ($115 billion in liability in 2011) - The 2012 US Farm Bill, which is...