Coping with Risk in Agriculture

Coping with Risk in Agriculture

by J B Hardaker, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, University of New England, Australia; R B M Huirne, Department of Farm Management, Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands; J R Anderson, The World Bank, Washington DC, USA

Pub Date: February 1997
Paperback
288 pages

Readership
Senior undergraduate or graduate students of agricultural economics and farm management or business, as well as advisers to farmers.

Main Description
Risk and uncertainty are inescapable factors in agriculture. Farmers face production risk, from the weather, crop and livestock performance, and pests and diseases, as well as government-controlled institutional risk, and personal or human risk. Together with price or market risks, these constitute business risk which is further related to financial risk. All of these factors must be managed to achieve satisfactory management in agriculture.
The aim of this book is to introduce the nature of agricultural decision making under uncertainty, the concept of rational choice and its foundations in theories of probability and risk preference. It also describes methods for the analysis of risky decisions that can be used in agriculture and the preparation of plans for risk management.

Main Contents
• Introduction to risk in agriculture
• An outline of decision analysis
• Measuring uncertainty with subjective probabilities
• Making better probability judgements
• Attitudes to risky consequences
• Integrating beliefs and preferences for decision analysis
• Decision analysis with preferences unknown
• Decision analysis with multiple objectives
• Accounting for risk in programming models for whole-farm planning
• Risky farm decision making and time
• Strategies farmers can use to manage risk
• Risk considerations in agricultural policy making and planning