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Agricultural economics

The agricultural sector is of huge importance for New Zealand. Many significant public policy issues such as environmental protection, innovation, growth in GDP, management of financial risk, and land use and infrastructure have important agricultural dimensions.

To address this challenge we have established an Agricultural Economics programme at Motu. This aims to build an evidence base as a foundation for public discussion of some of the important issues.

Examples of specific issues that may be included in the research plan include:

The productivity gap across agricultural sectors and the factors/drivers affecting this
Linking agricultural productivity to regional wellbeing and economic growth
Adaptation and resilience of farmers under an uncertain changing climate
Increasing our understanding of farmers’ decision making towards insurance, investments, and adoption of new practices

However, even though we are currently building this capacity, we have already produced several documents directly related to agricultural issues, which can be found below. We also have a current research project that aims to understand the barriers that farmers might face when deciding whether or not to adopt new mitigation option that would have zero financial cost for the farm.

Publications

How climate affects agricultural land values in Aotearoa New Zealand

Authors: Farnaz Pourzand | Kendon Bell

Working Paper

This paper examines how differences in climate across space influence the value of New Zealand agricultural land.

A Growing Problem: Exploring Livestock Farm Resilience to Droughts in Unit Record Data

Authors: Levente Timar | Eyal Apatov

Working Paper

In one of the first studies of its kind, a new paper by Motu Research investigates the impact of droughts on livestock farm enterprises by linking financial, agricultural and productivity data with historical weather data.

International Agricultural Mitigation Research and the Impacts and Value of Two SLMACC Research Projects

Authors: David Fleming | Kate Preston

Working Paper

GHG research
has significant impact.
Public funds do help.

Evaluating the benefits of publicly funded research is always a challenging task. This paper cannot produce air-tight quantification of the benefits of Sustainable Land Management and Climate…

Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions

Agricultural methane and nitrous oxide make up around half of New Zealand’s total emissions.

New Zealand can potentially make a significant contribution to the global climate effort through research and policy that mitigate agricultural emissions. Motu has…

No-cost barriers

Motu, in coordination with Landcare and AgResearch, recently finished a three-year project seeking to better understand why some apparent ‘no-cost’ options for agricultural mitigation (reduction of biological greenhouse gas emissions) remain non- or under-adopted in…

Value and impact of publicly funded climate change agricultural mitigation research: Insights from New Zealand

Authors: David Fleming | Kate Preston | Andrea Arratia-Solar

Article

In this paper we discuss a framework to evaluate the benefits of publicly-funded research that includes scientific impact, impacts on stakeholders (next and end users of research outputs), and economic and environmental values. We apply…