The practices products and resource management of Australia’s farm managers and their environmental consequences are being closely scrutinised by the community. Accreditation is an approach increasingly being used to monitor these matters across agricultural industries. Quality Assurance...

This paper reviews historical, philosophical and socio-cultural information as a means of explaining why saltbush in Australia has declined. That decline coincided with introduced hard hoofed animals overgrazing native pastures and was compounded by land clearing. Over time, losing ecosystem...

In this paper it is argued that solving problems in farm management involves applying an appropriate balance of disciplinary knowledge. More specifically, farm management decision-making is about making choices, and the discipline of choice is economics. Thus economics is the core discipline of...

Farm systems in Australia are open systems. The financial openness of farm systems has implications for managing farms and, thus, implications for analysing farm management decisions and farm performance. In elaborating on this theme, capital investment in agriculture is considered and key ideas...

Farms and farming are major contributors to the world economy, directly responsible for a large part of GDP. These achievements are not trivial and imply that farms are being managed in reasonably effective ways, else agricultural industries would not be sustained. However has the study of Farm...

This study analyses the financial risk faced by representative mixed-enterprise farm businesses in four regions of south-eastern Australia. It uses discrete stochastic programming to optimise the ten-year cash flow margins produced by these farms, operating three alternative farming systems....

The natural, technological, economic, political and social environment in which farmers farm constantly changes. History has lessons about change in agriculture and about farmers coping with change, though the future is unknowable and thus always surprising. The implication for farm operation is...

The dairy industry in northern Victoria faced dramatic changes between 2001/02 and 2002/03. Drought resulted in a substantial decrease in availability, and subsequent increase in price, of irrigation water and supplementary feed. Most farms recorded substantial net cash flow deficits. Prior to...

This paper describes the development and application of a dynamic financial appraisal software model, known as the Financial Planner for Macadamia. This whole farm financial model for macadamia farming integrates both the investment and financing decisions of project appraisal into a single...