The dynamics of an animal - vegetation system: Sheep farming

Anders Skonhoft () and José-María Da Rocha
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José-María Da Rocha: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and RGEA-Universidade deVigo

Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract: The paper studies the economy and ecology of sheep farming at the farm level in a Nordic context, with a crucial distinction between the outdoors grazing season and the winter indoors feeding season, and where climate conditions fix the length of the grazing season. Two different categories of animals, ewes (adult females) and lambs, and one plant species are included in our ecological model. The farmer is assumed to maximize present-value profit where the revenue is made up income from meat and wool production, and we find that livestock cycles may represent an optimal management policy. We also show that, in a possible steady state with a constant number of animals and constant vegetation quantity, slaughtering either only lambs or only ewes is optimal.

Keywords: sheep farming; vegetation growth; dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2012-09-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iso/WP/2012/13_sheepdynamic_AS.pdf (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nst:samfok:13612

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