Empirical test of an agricultural landscape model: the importance of farmer preference for risk aversion and crop complexity

Cooke, Ira R., Mattison, Elizabeth H.A., Audsley, Eric, Bailey, Alison P., Freckleton, Robert P., Graves, Anil R., Morris, Joe, Queenborough, Simon A., Sandars, Daniel L., Siriwardena, Gavin M., Trawick, Paul, Watkinson, Andrew R., and Sutherland, William J. (2013) Empirical test of an agricultural landscape model: the importance of farmer preference for risk aversion and crop complexity. SAGE Open, 3. pp. 1-16.

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Abstract

Developing models to predict the effects of social and economic change on agricultural landscapes is an important challenge. Model development often involves making decisions about which aspects of the system require detailed description and which are reasonably insensitive to the assumptions. However, important components of the system are often left out because parameter estimates are unavailable. In particular, measurements of the relative influence of different objectives, such as risk, environmental management, on farmer decision making, have proven difficult to quantify. We describe a model that can make predictions of land use on the basis of profit alone or with the inclusion of explicit additional objectives. Importantly, our model is specifically designed to use parameter estimates for additional objectives obtained via farmer interviews. By statistically comparing the outputs of this model with a large farm-level land-use data set, we show that cropping patterns in the United Kingdom contain a significant contribution from farmer's preference for objectives other than profit. In particular, we found that risk aversion had an effect on the accuracy of model predictions, whereas preference for a particular number of crops grown was less important. While nonprofit objectives have frequently been identified as factors in farmers' decision making, our results take this analysis further by demonstrating the relationship between these preferences and actual cropping patterns.

Item ID: 44670
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 2158-2440
Additional Information:

Copyright © 2016 by SAGE Publications Inc, unless otherwise noted. Manuscript content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Licenses.

Funders: Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU), Arcadia
Date Deposited: 26 Jul 2016 00:07
FoR Codes: 14 ECONOMICS > 1402 Applied Economics > 140201 Agricultural Economics @ 50%
01 MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES > 0102 Applied Mathematics > 010206 Operations Research @ 50%
SEO Codes: 96 ENVIRONMENT > 9606 Environmental and Natural Resource Evaluation > 960601 Economic Incentives for Environmental Protection @ 100%
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