Risk management strategies and decision support systems in agriculture: a study of risk management in rainfed farming systems in Queensland

Abstract

Rainfed agricultural production systems in a semi-arid climate operate under high risk. While weather variability is the major source of risk over much of Australia, other sources of risk include finance, markets, human resources, and changes in government policy. Most farmers employ a range of strategies to manage these risks. A comprehensive risk management program has to take many complex interactions into account and decision support systems (DSS) have been designed (as their name suggests) to offer assistance in making some of these decisions. However, DSS are not widely used by farmers as they often address only part of the risk management problem and may do that in a way that is too complex for many farmers to understand. In addition, many farmers believe that their tried and tested strategies for managing risk are satisfactory. For better adoption, each DSS should be easy to use and provide local information. The use of DSS to stimulate discussion and appreciation of the complexity of managing risk by farmers and students of agriculture suggests that ‘discussion support’ might be a more appropriate term. After a series of interactions with a group of rainfed cropping farmers in south-west Queensland, a decision support tool (‘Key to dryland planting decisions’) for rainfed farms in south-west Queensland was developed. It uses Lucid3 software to capture the timing and logic of the decision-making process and structures the process to select preferred crop planting options for both summer and winter planting periods from a wide range of possibilities.