How Profitable is Farm Business in Australia? Farm Performance Data and Some Implications from ABARE Broadacre and Dairy Industries Farm Surveys

Erwin Lagura and Glenn Ronan

No 59095, 2010 Conference (54th), February 10-12, 2010, Adelaide, Australia from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society

Abstract: Time series data on farm profitability for Australia and South Australia from ABARE’s farm surveys, shows a minority of businesses consistently profitable and a majority not. The paper finds evidence of prevalent and persistent negative farm profit in both available long-run data (1990-2007) and more recent data (2006-09). Trends in several structural change elements, productivity, farm size and age of operators, are also examined to aid the interpretation of farm economic performance in agri-food. The paper concludes with several contemporary examples of public policy distorting the structure and performance of the farm sector and spoiling the usefulness of profitability as an indicator of sectoral performance. Policies on hobby farming tax benefits, drought, and agribusiness managed investment schemes policy are discussed in this context

Keywords: Agribusiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/59095/files/Lagura_Ewin.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aare10:59095

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.59095

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2010 Conference (54th), February 10-12, 2010, Adelaide, Australia from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().