Modelling agricultural land use allocation in regional Australia

Abstract

An analysis of the drivers of agricultural land use is important for policy makers as the issues of climate change and food security become increasingly prominent in the political landscape. This paper analyses the role of prices, total land holdings and climate on land use in Australia. The analysis relates to a unique comprehensive coverage of commodity types at a regional level. An explicit treatment of missing data and the novel use of cluster analysis is employed within a partial adjustment framework for modelling land allocation. The majority of commodity types across regions exhibit significant degrees of slow partial adjustment for land allocation, the frequency of slow adjustment is greatest with crops and livestock and weakest for vegetables. In general, relative own and cross prices, total land holdings and rainfall only have a minor impact on short-term land allocations, however numerous individual commodity/regional combinations have identified significant short-run impacts.

Will climate change jeopardize the Vietnamese target of maintaining farmland for food security? A fractional multinomial logit analysis of land use choice

“…Once we had controlled for irrigation and past weather fluctuations, we found the choice of crops to be less sensitive to precipitation than to temperature, as illustrated in Figure 2. This insight is consistent with the finding from Moniruzzaman (2015) and Oczkowski and Bandara (2013) who found minor impacts of rainfall on land allocation in Bangladesh and Australia, respectively. A wetter winter is likely to induce the shift from cereals to fruit production.…”

Farmers' response to COVID-19 disruptions in the food systems in Ghana: the case of cropland allocation decision.

“…The relationship between the optimal land allocation for crop 𝑖𝑖 and the input price of crop 𝑗𝑗 depends on the nature of the jointness of production. Following the argument of Oczkowski & Bandara, (2013), "cross-price complementarity arises in the jointness case given that the increased use of one input tends to increase the marginal productivity of other inputs." Given that maize and soybean are jointly produced, if the farmer increases the production of soybean then the possibility of increasing maize production is high since the maize can benefit from the nitrogen fixation by the soybean.…”