New Zealand Farmer Attitude and Opinion Survey 2008 : Management systems and farming sustainability (original) (raw)
Proceedings of the New Zealand Grassland Association, 1993
Formal knowledge of the goals, circumstances and constraints of a random sample of hill country sheep and beef farmers has been established. This knowledge was gathered, in collaboration with farmers from the Taihape/Bunterville and coastal Hawkes Bay regions, during phase one of the Farmer First Research programme based at Massey University. The data show that 75% of the farmers, in the study were willing to make changes to increase the profitability of their current farming system. However, although willing to change, 53% were unable to do so because of constraints they faced. Two of these major constraints identified by farmers were high debt and a low incomegenerating under-developed farm. Both of these constraints contributed to an inadequacy of cash for the farmer. The other major constraints identified were labour, an ownership structure which limited the farmers' decision-making role in the property and the relatively low production potential of their farms. Phase one da...
North Island hill country farmers? management response to issues of sustainability
New Zealand Geographer, 2007
This paper explores the impediments to optimizing the economic and environmental performance of agriculture in the North Island hill country. The work draws on a range of data sources including consolidated statistical data obtained from The New Zealand Meat and Wool Board's Economic Service (NZMWB) for all North Island hill and hard country farms for the period 1976-77 to 1996-97 and interviews in June and July 1999 with 35 farm households throughout the North Island. Despite generally low levels of profitability, there is considerable evidence that New Zealand farmers have engaged in moves to sustainability to a significant extent.
Farmers’ experiences of the farm assessment: interviews with farmers
May 2010 the present study is part of the Welfare Quality ® research project which has been cofinanced by the european Commission, within the 6th framework programme, contract No. fooD-Ct-2004-506508. the text represents the authors' views and does not necessarily represent a position of the Commission who will not be liable for the use made of such information.
Changes in the age of New Zealand farmers: Problems for the future?
New Zealand Geographer, 2009
Earlier research shows that between 1971 and 1981, the number of farmers in New Zealand increased and their average age decreased, whereas between 1981 and 1991, the opposite trend occurred. This article addresses the issue of change in the average age of farmers since 1991 using recent census data. It reviews the difficulties in obtaining good data and describes the adjustments need to be made to obtain a consistent data series from 1971 to 2006. The long-term trend for increasing age of farmers and farm workers continues. This demographic aspect of farm structural change is then discussed in terms of the sustainability of farming by reference to productivity and potential problems with succession.
Farmers’ perception of opportunities for farm development
Problem definition 1.2 Research objective and questions 1.3 Thesis structure 2 Theory, analytical framework and methodology 2.1 Opportunity identification 2.2 Strategic decision-making 2.3 Threefold embedding 2.4 The analytical framework 2.5 Research methodology 2.5.1 The socio-material context of Kampereiland case study 2.5.2 Research phases 2.6 Ethical remarks: consent and confidentiality 3 Differences in farmers' perception of opportunities for farm (Roep 2000; OECD 2006; Horlings 2010). Examples include energy production and new value chains with products and services that build upon the characteristics of the farm and the rural context as added value (Potter and Tilzey 2005; Oostindie 2015). The development of diversification increases the number of possibilities for farm development, and, thus, the heterogeneity in farm development. Heterogeneity in farm development did not, however, start with diversification in farming. Literature on heterogeneity in farming has shown the existence of different 'farming styles' , in which farm practices are organised in distinctive ways, based on the different approaches of the production factors, labour and capital on the farm (Ploeg and Long 1994; Ploeg 2003). 'Each style can be seen as a distinctive way of equilibrating the many balances that link farming, the farming family and the outside world' (Ploeg and Ventura 2014, 23). These three developments meet in the field of interest for this thesis: the process of strategic decision-making of the farmer, who operates in, and is part of, a socio-material context that affects, and is affected by, the farm practices. A farmer, in the role of entrepreneur, aims to secure farm income by selecting a strategy for farm development in an iterative process of deliberating about the aims and needs of the family farm in relation to the opportunities for farm development that are perceived as viable. In the decision-making on farm strategies, the family farm is inherently intertwined with pre-existing socio-material structures; the farmer does not, and cannot make strategic decisions, as if it operates on a 'blank canvas'. The socio-material structures both enable and restrict farm development, the structures offer limitations and opportunities (Giddens 1984). In other words, there is 'room for manoeuvre' to act within the socio-material context. Operating in this room for manoeuvre, farmers are knowledgeable and interpretive actors, whose actions are guided by, but not determined by, social structures. In making decisions, the farmer influences and, thus, enacts the socio-material structures. This means that the actions and decisions of farmers affect the room for manoeuvre for farm development. In entrepreneurship research, the topic of strategic decision-making in the context of small business is part of a growing body of research. The importance of studying entrepreneurship in relation to its context is described by Watson (2013, 407): 'To act entrepreneurially is to innovate, to deal with social and economic circumstances, with those very circumstances constraining as well as enabling the shaping of entrepreneurial actions and their outcomes'. Another important author in this respect is Welter (2011), who has illustrated how a contextualised view of entrepreneurship contributes to a further understanding of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. The relation of the actor with its context is a key research field for Sociology, the fields of Entrepreneurship Research and The second field of interest is the embedding of the farm in the socio-material context, in which it operates. The embedding in the context is an important aspect in the identification of opportunities (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993; McKeever et al. 2015) and is, therefore, likely to also be important for the perception of opportunities. Farm development strategies cannot be explained solely by economic drivers, social embeddedness is also an important factor in farm development (Feola et al. 2015). The concept of Embeddedness is a prominent theoretical and analytical tool to study the relation between an actor or a business and the context in which it operates (Akgún et al. 2010; Roep and Wiskerke 2012a; Ferguson and Hansson 2015). Embeddedness finds its roots in study of the social dimension of economic activity (Granovetter 1985; Dequech 2003). The context, in which an actor is embedded, is broad, ranging from territorial to cultural and from social to ecological. In the context of the study of agri-food networks, embeddedness is often studied through focus on the territorial context of food production (Sonnino 2007). This approach creates a binary view, in which embedding of food production is seen as 'the re-placement' of food and food production in its local context, in response to the ' dis-embedding' forces of conventional food networks (Goodman and Goodman 2009, 208). The binary focus on one aspect of embeddedness creates the risk of losing the interaction between the different fields of embeddedness. An avenue for a more complex approach of embeddedness is found in the work of Hess. Hess reconnects embeddedness to its original meaning: 'the social relationships between both economic and non-economic actors' , and brings it back to the simple question of: 'who is embedded in what' (2004, 176). Hess introduced three dimensions of embeddedness: 1) societal embeddedness, which signifies the importance of where an actor comes from, considering the societal (i.e., cultural, political, etc.) background; 2) network embeddedness, which describes the network of actors a person or organisation is involved in; and 3) territorial embeddedness, which considers the extent to which an actor is 'anchored' in particular territories or places (Hess 2004, 177). The combination of the three dimensions creates a three-dimensional embeddedness perspective and offers a symmetrical, non-binary approach to study differences in the embedding of farms. For use in this thesis, the term ' embedding' is preferred over ' embeddedness': the embedding of a farm in the socio-material context is an active and evolving process, and not a static state of being. This avenue of threefold embedding raises the question of how strategic decision-making in farm development is related to the embedding of the farm in the socio-material context. The combination of the questions related to these two fields creates the core focus of this thesis: the identification of differences in farmers' perception of 1. What are the differences in farmers' perception of opportunities for farm development whilst operating in a highly comparable context? 2. What are the most important drivers for differences in farmers' perception of opportunities for farm development? 3. What are the differences in the embedding of the farm practices that are linked to differences in farmers' perception of opportunities for farm development? Analytical framework 23 'Three-fold embeddedness of farm development'