School of Agricultural and Resource Economics

Potential topics to undertake as your fourth year research or honours project.

Potential project topics

Summer crops (e.g. sunflower) in South Western Australia 

Farmers are beginning to grow summer crops in areas such as Kojonup. Are these crops likely to be grown sporadically or will farmers adopt them as part of their traditional farming programs? If these crops do become established, what are the ramifications for handling and marketing of these crops?

Farming Rabbits - an economic solution to solving salinity in rural towns?

Researchers from CSIRO, UWA and other organisations are addressing issues associated with salinity in rural towns. There are several options for the use of saline and/or fresh or desalinated water in potential agriculture/aquaculture that need to be explored from an economic perspective to ensure sound policy decisions are made. Could rabbit farming combined with a value adding enterprise be an option?

Would you drink water to save a rural town?

Reducing the water table under some rural Western Australian towns will save costs associated with damage and decay. Abstracting this water and converting it into water fit for the bottled water market could be a viable option providing consumers will drink it. What are the attributes that people consider important in making such decisions? How much will they pay for this bottled water if they know they are also 'saving a town'?

Making money out of waste

Desalinating water results in waste products that can't be pumped into the sea if the process is occurring in inland WA. Are viable processes available to extract valuable elements from this waste? What markets exist for such elements and what might restrict entry into these markets?

Determining the risk of herbicide resistance

Grain growers are often faced with the decision of whether to keep using herbicides until resistance develops or to invest in practices to prevent or delay resistance. Selecting the best option requires information on how soon resistance will develop. Ideally, farmers would be able to use their herbicide application history to calculate the probablity of herbicide resistance developing in the future and when it is likely to appear. Using available records from hundreds of paddocks, this project is aimed at developing a decision-aid model that will help farmers and advisors determine this risk of herbicide resistance development.

Evaluating the impact of farmer-led groups

Farmer-led groups are playing an increasing role in research and development at a local district level. Do farmers value information that comes from this participatory research more than information from other extension sources? And what value does the information have outside the local group membership? By working with grower groups and farmers that use the information generated by these groups, the project aims to determine the broader impact and value of grower groups in agriculture and the best evaluation approach.

Soil quality, agricultural production practices, and newer approaches to the production of food

Use tools and knowledge from production econonmics and soil science to study the efficiency and sustainability of alternative agricultural production systems. Examples: organic versus conventional ways of producing an agricultural product, evaluation of alternative crop sequencing or rotation choices.

Biodiversity and environmental conservation on private land

For a chosen conservation issue (wildlife, native vegetation, water quality, etc), examine the consequences of current approaches and the benefits of alternative policy solutions (new incentive based schemes, regulatory approaches, etc) that could be employed to tackle the conservation problem at hand.

Environmentally sensitive analaysis of productivity growth

Incorporate environmental effects to come up with more balanced (environmentally sensitive) measures of technological progress and productivity over time. The focus of analysis can be individual firms, industries (e.g. agriculture), or national economies. The evaluation could also be across firms or industries. Examples of topics of interest in this area include: agriculture and greenhous gas emissions and horticulture and water quality in the Canning Swan river system.

Fishery management

Analysing producer response to fishery policy through time. Interesting fisheries include the Crayfish industry and the Snapper fishery.

Non-renewables

The WA economy is supported by non-renewable resources; oil, gas, gold, diamond and iron ore. How do these industries develop and how should they be regulated?

Risk management

Farmers are becoming more sophisticated in their use of futures and options to manage risk. How should they use these instruments to reduce risk?

The impact of climate variability on farm productivity gain

Does climate variability reduce a farm's ability to attain high rates of productivity improvement? What might be the implications of climate change on broadacre farm productivity growth in Western Australia?

Design and cost of an intellectual property right reward mechanism: the case of crop improvement royalties

Australia has developed and implemented a system of collecting crop production royalties based on varieties protected by plant breeder's rights. What have been the set-up and on-going administrative costs associated with this royalty system? What have been the major issues that have needed to be faced in the design and implementation of this royalty system? 

Low input versus high input farming systems: their relative performance

For broadacre, rainfed farms which input strategy is preferable; high inputs or low inputs? Using farm data, identify which farms fall into either category and examine their business performance over several years. Do any clear findings emerge about the relative merits of either input strategy?

Building an innovation culture: theory and practice - the case of Peters-Brownes

The onset of dairy industry de-regulation in Western Australia provided a range of threats and opportunities. How did Peters-Brownes, as dairy processers, transform their business to build an innovative culture and generate substantial share-holder worth? This study would examine the theory of how to develop and reward innovation in a business and then use the Peters-Brownes story as a practical case study in innovation building.

Re-visiting the farm economics of GE cropping

Farm-level analysis of the economics of GE cropping in Australia need to be re-visited in light of the current environment of more expensive fuels and chemicals, changes in the incidence of herbicide resistant weed populations and the likely emergence of different and stacked GE traits in competing nations' grain production. Is the farm-level economic case for or against GE cropping any different now?

State-contingent modelling versus discrete stochastic programming

State-contingent modelling is being advocated as the best framework for examining the impacts of risk and uncertainty in many settings. Using simple farm enterprise models compare and contrast the theoretical and practical advantages of this approach against those offered by discrete stochastic programming.

The economics of supply of wheat starch for ethanol production

When ethanol manufacturers purchase wheat feedstock for their ethanol plants they typically purchase cheaper grades of wheat. However, there is variability and uncertainty as to the starch content of the various wheat grades. How does this variability and uncertainty affect the cost of production for ethanol and is the feedstock purchasing behaviour of the ethanol producer affected? 

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