The Agricultural Production Survey (APS) is Statistics New Zealand’s vehicle for collecting important information about New Zealand’s primary production. It is an annual postal survey and covers land use, livestock and arable farming, horticultural and forestry production, and selected farm practices. The APS programme started with a census in 2002, and continues a history of official statistics that covers agriculture over the past 150 years.

Water consumed through evapotranspiration (ET) impacts local and regional hydrologic regimes on various spatial and temporal scales. Estimating ET in the Great Plains is a prerequisite for effective regional water resource management of the Ogallala (High Plains) Aquifer, which supplies vital water resources in the form of irrigation for extensive agricultural production.

This paper presents an analysis of agricultural contracts using a transaction costs approach. We contend that in a context of modern agriculture, with well defined property rights, agricultural contracts must balance costs and benefits, aligning tenant and landlord incentives towards a similar objective. The study debates the potential effects of tenancy status and duration of contracts, over soil conservation and input use.

The Office de la Haute Vallée du Fleuve Niger (OHVN) zone in southern Mali is a small but important agricultural production region. Against a background of environmental degradation including decades of declining rainfall, soil erosion, and human pressure on forest resources, numerous farming communities stand out through the use of improved soil and water management practices that have improved agricultural and environmental conditions. Field surveys conducted in 1998-2001 indicated that environmental and agricultural conditions have improved in the past decade.

The migration of young people from rural areas is common in all agricultural regions of Russia, and Altai Krai, located in southwestern Siberia, is no exception. Out-migration, aversion to working in agriculture and the aging of farmers and farm managers are serious problems that raise questions about who will work in agriculture in the future. This paper aims to investigate factors that affect the decisions of agricultural students from Altai Krai to out-migrate or to return to their rural parental municipalities after finishing their university studies.

Property regimes shape the social relations, in particular, social settings, and represent an important element for external intervention and sustainable rural development. The introduction recalls common aspects and specific conceptualisations of property analysis in the field of economics, sociology and social anthropology and summarises main academic discourses about property rights in order to develop a differentiated understanding of property. In Section 1, general trends in property relations characterising modern rural societies are outlined.

Presentation Overview:Convey key OECD findings about agriculture in Brazil and China; Identify the key results of policy reform; Present implications for the future.

Presented to USDA Economists Group, Washington, DC, March 11, 2009
Discusses land use conflicts between agriculture, conservation, development and energy.

Sustainable land management requires that water and matter (nutrients and base cations) are efficiently recycled within ecosystems so that irreversible losses of matter from topsoils are minimised. Matter losses are connected to water flow. The division of water into evapotranspiration that is loss-free, and seepage to groundwater or surface water flow that both carry material losses, is decisive in determining total losses of dissolved matter in a given catchment. Investigations of areal matter losses confirmed the instrumental role of vegetation cover.