Adoption of environmental assurance in pastoral industry supply chains - Market failure and beyond

This paper describes adoption rates of environmental assurance within meat and wool supply chains, and discusses this in terms of market interest and demand for certified 'environmentally friendly' products, based on phone surveys and personal interviews with pastoral producers, meat and wool processors, wholesalers and retailers, and domestic consumers. Members of meat and wool supply chains, particularly pastoral producers, are both aware of and interested in implementing various forms of environmental assurance, but significant costs combined with few private benefits have resulted in low adoption rates. The main reason for the lack of benefits is that the end user (the consumer) does not value environmental assurance and is not willing to pay for it. For this reason, global food and fibre supply chains, which compete to supply consumers with safe and quality food at the lowest price, resist public pressure to implement environmental assurance. This market failure is further exacerbated by highly variable environmental and social production standards required of primary producers in different countries, and the disparate levels of government support provided to them. Given that it is the Australian general public and not markets that demand environmental benefits from agriculture, the Australian government has a mandate to use public funds to counter this market failure. A national farm environmental policy should utilise a range of financial incentives to reward farmers for delivering general public good environmental outcomes, with these specified and verified through a national environmental assurance scheme.

Development of a model based on Bayesian networks to estimate the probability of sheep lice presence at shearing

This paper describes the development of a model, based on Bayesian networks, to estimate the likelihood that sheep flocks are infested with lice at shearing and to assist farm managers or advisers to assess whether or not to apply a lousicide treatment. The risk of lice comes from three main sources: (i) lice may have been present at the previous shearing and not eradicated; (ii) lice may have been introduced with purchased sheep; and (iii) lice may have entered with strays. A Bayesian network is used to assess the probability of each of these events independently and combine them for an overall assessment. Rubbing is a common indicator of lice but there are other causes too. If rubbing has been observed, an additional Bayesian network is used to assess the probability that lice are the cause. The presence or absence of rubbing and its possible cause are combined with these networks to improve the overall risk assessment.