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1 – 10 of over 9000Michael Thomas Hayden, Ruth Mattimoe and Lisa Jack
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the financial decision-making process of farmers and to highlight the potential role that improved farm…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the financial decision-making process of farmers and to highlight the potential role that improved farm financial management (FFM) could play in developing sustainable farm enterprises.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts a qualitative approach with 27 semi-structured interviews exploring farmers’ financial decision-making processes. Subsequently, the interview findings were presented to a focus group. Sensemaking theory is adopted as a theoretical lens to develop the empirical findings.
Findings
The evidence highlights that FFM has a dual role to play in farmer decision-making. Some FFM activities may act as a cue, which triggers a sensebreaking activity, causing the farmer to enter a process of sensemaking whilst some/other FFM activities are drawn upon to provide a sensegiving role in the sensemaking process. The role of FFM in farmer decision-making is strongly influenced by the decision type (strategic or operational) being undertaken and the farm type (dairy, tillage or beef) in operation.
Originality/value
The literature suggests that the majority of farmers spend little time on financial management. However, there are farmers who have quite a high level of engagement in FFM activities, when undertaking strategic farm expansion decisions. Those FFM activities help them to navigate through operational decision-making and to make sense of their strategic decision-making.
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Floor H. W. Ambrosius, Gert Jan Hofstede, Bettina B. Bock, Eddie A.M. Bokkers and Adrie J.M. Beulens
The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that models farmers’ strategic decision making, taking into account that farmers adapt to institutional changes, given the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that models farmers’ strategic decision making, taking into account that farmers adapt to institutional changes, given the social structure in which they are embedded.
Design/methodology/approach
First, a theoretical framework was developed using the reasoned action approach, innovation diffusion research, identity research, and the theory of structuration. Second, the framework was refined based on insights gained through semi-structured interviews with seven pork farmers and six pork farming experts on innovation decisions in general and added-value market adoption in particular.
Findings
The farmer decision-making framework distinguishes personal characteristics, social influence related to reference groups, and the institutional context that determines the space for manoeuvre. The interviews reveal the importance of context specific factors, such as trust in policy and market requirements, and point at general mechanisms of path dependency as a result of previous decision making and social influence related to identity reference groups.
Originality/value
The authors include feedback mechanisms between on the one hand social structure and institutional context, and on the other, farmer decision making. The framework is designed to explore the combined influence of factors of decision making on sector behaviour and study the relation between individual and collective behaviour.
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Joanne Louise Tingey-Holyoak, Sarah Ann Wheeler and Constantin Seidl
Australian agriculture is facing increasingly uncertain weather patterns which is impacting financial performance, exacerbated by worsening terms of trade and a decline in…
Abstract
Purpose
Australian agriculture is facing increasingly uncertain weather patterns which is impacting financial performance, exacerbated by worsening terms of trade and a decline in commodity prices. Increasing the resilience and adaptive capacity of the primary production sector is of key importance. Governments and farmer groups often depict technology adoption as the salvation of farming, frequently ignoring the importance of decision-making processes and soft information skills and needs. The purpose of this study is to explore farmer decision-making and resilience and, in doing so, address ongoing challenges with soft information, including the inaccessibility of accounting data and a lack of awareness of its formal role in strategic decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on a strategic choice perspective, we explore the links between farmer characteristics, attitudes, technology orientation, decision-making and financial performance to investigate how accounting data and tools could better support growers’ adaptive capacity. Detailed on-farm interviews were conducted with 25 grape growers across the Riverland in South Australia, with information thematically and descriptively analysed.
Findings
Results show that farmers with low operating profit margins spend double the time making decisions and struggle with minimising variable costs, especially water costs. Lower profit growers were also less likely to perceive climate change as a threat and demonstrated lower resilience.
Originality/value
The results highlight the potential for accountants to make more use of data-driven technological advances and for this information to be used to enhance on-farm strategic decision-making and support innovative business models. Simply packaged biophysical and financial data could also support strategic decisions and adaptation of farmers struggling to make a profit.
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The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how management accountants can become relevant business partners out of respect for existing locally developed accounts of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how management accountants can become relevant business partners out of respect for existing locally developed accounts of economic performance for decision-making.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with local business actors, in this case, families from seven financially successful Danish dairy farms. The casework and the analysis have been informed by pragmatic constructivism.
Findings
The local business actors do not use the official accounting system for ongoing cost-management-related decision-making. Instead, they use several epistemic methods that include locally developed decision models, experiences, rules of thumb and intuition. The farmers use these vernacular accountings to compensate for the cost management illusion that the formal accounting system tends to create. What the study suggests is that when management accountants engage as business partners, they are likely to enter a space where accounting is already present.
Originality/value
This paper argues that local business actors practice epistemic methods where they develop and use vernacular accountings to support their managerial practice, also in the absence of a professional management accountant. These vernacular accountings may lead the local actors into an illusion because the vernacular accountings do not necessarily have an inherent economic logic and theoretical reliability. The role of the management accountant in such a setting is hence to understand, support and advance local epistemic methods. Becoming a business partner requires a combination of management accounting analytical skills and a sense of empathy and sensitivity regarding what is already at play and how this can become an object of discussion without violating the values of the other.
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This study aims to determine the non-economic factors that probably influence the Pakistani farmers to use Islamic finance for agricultural production. This paper analyzes the…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to determine the non-economic factors that probably influence the Pakistani farmers to use Islamic finance for agricultural production. This paper analyzes the other religiosity and familial leadership constructs in the standard theory of planned behavior (TPB) model from the Islamic banking perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 233 farmers using snowball sampling techniques and partial least square structural equation modeling used for data analysis. An additional qualitative analysis was conducted of seven respondents through semi-structured interviews to deepen into knowledge about Islamic banking.
Findings
The findings demonstrate that attitude, subjective norms, religiosity and familial leadership to use Islamic banking among the farmers play a primary motivating role in manipulating their behavioral intentions to use it. However, PBC negatively affected the behavior of farmers to use Islamic banking.
Practical implications
This study highlights the importance of emotional attachment between the farmers and Islamic financial products according to Shariah law. Therefore, Islamic banks need effective strategies for the development of innovative products in the agricultural sector according to the Shariah principle.
Originality/value
The research contributes to the area of Islamic banking, demonstrating that “familial leadership” significantly influences an individual’s behavior toward decision-making to use Islamic finance.
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Being a manager of his/her farmholding, the smallholder is described as having objectives and decisions. The smallholder is therefore a decision maker reflecting an organised…
Abstract
Being a manager of his/her farmholding, the smallholder is described as having objectives and decisions. The smallholder is therefore a decision maker reflecting an organised decision‐making unit. These activities are carried out with the purpose of satisfying the small farmer’s goals as derived from objectives and priorities set. Farm level operations are upheld as a typical goal‐oriented system in which farmers’ decisions are taken in consideration with the prevailing environment and constraints. Chosen for this discussion are the Kisii, Vihiga and Kakamega areas of western Kenya. These areas are characterised by high population density, high agricultural potential area with reduced land, practising permanent cultivation with mixed farming, poverty and low incomes and unsteady food supplies. Basically this describes the smallholder environment and its constraints in relation to fish pond farming. What is apparent is the understanding of the environment and how it shapes the farmers’ operations in directing their decisions with reference to pond fisheries. Covered in this discussion are issues relating to farmer management strategies, decision‐making processes, decision making at the farm level and the information application processes.
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Farmers often decide simultaneously on crop production or input use without knowing other farmers' decisions. Anticipating the behavior of other farmers can increase financial…
Abstract
Purpose
Farmers often decide simultaneously on crop production or input use without knowing other farmers' decisions. Anticipating the behavior of other farmers can increase financial performance. This paper investigates the role of other famers' behaviors and other contextual factors in farmers' simultaneous production decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
Market entry games are a common method for investigating simultaneous production decisions. However, so far they have been conducted with abstract tasks and by untrained subjects. The authors extend market entry games by using three real contexts: pesticide use, animal welfare and wheat production, in an incentivized framed field experiment with 323 German farmers.
Findings
The authors find that farmers take different decisions under identical incentive structures for the three contexts. While context plays a major role in their decisions, their expectations about the behavior of other farmers have little influence on their decision.
Originality/value
The paper offers new insights into the decision-making behavior of farmers. A better understanding of how farmers anticipate the behavior of other farmers in their production decisions can improve both the performance of individual farms and the allocational efficiency of agricultural and food markets.
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Nithicha Thamthanakoon, Iona Yuelu Huang, Jane Eastham, Shane Ward and Louise Manning
Since the end of the latest rice-pledging scheme, Thai rice farmers have had more freedom in selecting marketing channels. Understanding the determinants of farmers'…
Abstract
Purpose
Since the end of the latest rice-pledging scheme, Thai rice farmers have had more freedom in selecting marketing channels. Understanding the determinants of farmers' decision-making associated with these channels is of particular interest to multiple stakeholders in the rice value chain. This study aims to examine how economic, relational and psychological factors concurrently underpin Thai rice farmers' decision-making and influence their marketing channel choice.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on the theory of reasoned action and utility maximization of farmers’ decision making, this study used structural equation modeling to examine data collected from a nationwide sample of Thai rice farmers (n = 637), focusing on their past and intentional use of the three major marketing channels for paddy rice.
Findings
The determinants identified include four direct independent variables: attitude, subjective norm (social referents), transaction conditions and economic goals, and two indirect independent variables: past behavior and trust. Multi-group analysis suggests that rice co-operative users were more empowered to consider economic goals and attitude toward the channel, whilst rice miller and local collector users were more likely to be influenced by their social referents and the transaction conditions offered by the channel.
Practical implications
The findings highlight the need for policy to address trust and transparency issues with intermediaries and to empower farmers through the improvement of market access.
Originality/value
The study makes a unique and substantive contribution to the knowledge of farmers' decision-making about marketing channel choice in Thailand and theoretically contributes to the indirect role of past behavior in predicting prospective intention.
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The purpose of the paper is to analyse how the intensive use of non-financial performance measures and the lack of an economic reality among Danish farmers have contributed to a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to analyse how the intensive use of non-financial performance measures and the lack of an economic reality among Danish farmers have contributed to a low economic performance despite high productivity. The research ambition of the paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the managerial decision-making made by family business managers, in this case farmers, and how these decisions may impact financial performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on a case study including farmers, agricultural consultants and bankers. The analysis uses pragmatic constructivism to analyse the economic reality of the farmers included and the business topos among Danish farmers.
Findings
The main finding of the paper is that the dominating non-financial performance management techniques and a historically based strong emotional emphasis on size and production volume as the main success criteria for being a good farmer have led to a neglect of economic rationality. In addition, this practice has made the farmers blind to alternative possibilities for taking advantage of the resources available. The result has been an un-economic utopian reality.
Originality/value
The paper shows how the use of non-financial performance measures can lead to prolonging of a certain reality perception that may not be economically sustainable. Small family businesses such as family farms are likely to be more exposed to such risk because such businesses are run by a set of values that include more objectives that are more dominating than the profit objective. The paper concludes that family business managers must be open towards inputs from the society around the business, because family businesses may have a tendency to create their own reality that at some point may come in conflict with society of which the family business has to co-exist within.
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Nadia Adnan, Shahrina Md Nordin, Imran Rahman and Amir Noor
The purpose of this paper is to enhance the adoption decision of farmers and observe the factors that affect the adoption decision of sustainable agriculture practices (SAP) which…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to enhance the adoption decision of farmers and observe the factors that affect the adoption decision of sustainable agriculture practices (SAP) which is the major motivating force of Malaysian economy. The idea behind this study is to transfer knowledge to paddy farmers within regional areas of Malaysia and to comprehend their understanding of social innovation and sustainable agriculture engineering and their overall significance. The outcome of this research will suggest a strategic extensive plan to encourage the use of SAP and also help to develop SAP helping toward building a sustainable society.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper encompasses three phases: analyzing the process of SAP among Malaysian Paddy farmers, to agricultural industrialization, until the stage of SAP led by farmer’s co-operatives, discussing the relevant practice together with literature and historically evidencing that there is no better way to promote SAP among regional paddy farmers within Malaysia.
Findings
Initial objective of this paper is to establish a thoughtful approach to enable the society to bridge a gap between embracing sustainability. The second objective investigates the misconception among farmers about social innovation. Furthermore, the study builds the conceptual framework and examines the relationship among the relevant constructs, this framework is critically examining the literature within paddy farming context. Harmoniously, there has been limited empirical research performed on the decision of adoption toward SAP usage among paddy farmers in Malaysia.
Originality/value
The clear worth of this research paper is the illustration from past reviews and practices to endorse SAP usage among paddy farmers in Malaysia. Another literature review suggests that these countermeasures comprehensively, historically, and theoretically are proven result oriented. The information about SAP will be beneficial for farmers and policy maker who are interested in the advancement. This learning delivers a comparative summary of knowledge transfer influencing farmer’s intention and behavior of sustainable agriculture engineering to adopt green technology. In a future study, these construct will be empirically tested.
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