The silence of the lambs

Anders Skonhoft ()

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

Abstract: A model analyzing the economics of sheep farming is formulated. The basic idea is simple. Sheep are capital and they are held by farmers as long as their capital value exceeds their slaughter, or meat, value. The farmers are therefore portfolio managers aiming to find the optimal combination of different categories of animals and the yields are compared with the yields from other assets. The model is formulated within a Northern Scandinavian economic and biological setting with a crucial distinction between the outdoors grazing season and the indoors season, and with adult sheep and lambs being different categories. In the first step, the management problem is analyzed with only the meat income of the farmers taken into account. In the next step, income from wool production is considered as well. The analysis provides several results that differ from standard harvesting theory.

Keywords: natural resource modeling; sheep farming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2006-10-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iso/WP/2006/13sheepmodell1006.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:nst:samfok:7706

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Larsen ().