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The purpose of this paper is to explore the sustainability of small rural veterinary enterprise in light of recent changes in both the farming and veterinary sectors. The overarching research question relates to how small rural veterinary enterprises, especially those at the start-up stage, can meet the needs of their farming clients while ensuring their service offering is both viable and sustainable.

The paper draws on relevant rural enterprise and veterinary literatures as well as case data, and applies selected elements of Scott’s (2008) 7-P sustainability framework.

The authors find that the future sustainability of rural veterinary SMEs is dependent on the veterinary business owners being prepared to change with their clients, develop supportive partnerships and create effective marketing strategies. The authors use the findings to construct an innovative business model to help improve future sustainability of farm animal veterinary business.

The paper adopts a single case approach.

Some policy implications are discussed alongside avenues for future research. The paper contributes to the rural enterprise, agriculture and veterinary business literatures.

This is one of the few rural enterprise studies contextualized in the veterinary sector. The findings should be of value to both practitioners and policy makers concerned with ensuring future sustainability in this important sector.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of crop-livestock diversification among smallholders in the forest-savannah agroecological zone of Ghana.

The study uses a stochastic input distance function to investigate the evidence of economies of diversification and its effect on determining diversification decisions of smallholders in Ghana. Furthermore, this study also explores evidence of scale economies in integrated crop-livestock systems among smallholder farmers.

The empirical results show that economies of diversification are significant in determining diversification decisions of smallholders. The economies of scale are evident in integrated crop-livestock systems in Ghana, suggesting that opportunities exist to expand crop-livestock outputs without employing additional inputs or improved production technologies. Crop-livestock diversification is a desirable strategy for improving overall farm productivity among smallholders in Ghana. Economies of diversification were found to be significant among the output combinations, maize with other crops and other crops with livestock, in integrated crop-livestock production systems.

This study is based on a cross-sectional data set. Hence, the findings may be subject to some limitations; however, the authors have sought to minimise such limitations.

The results imply that crop-livestock diversification is a desirable strategy for improving overall farm productivity. Therefore, the findings are useful for policymakers to design appropriate strategies for enhancing the production of specific output combinations in crop-livestock diversification systems among smallholders in Ghana. Specifically, such policies should promote the production and integration of crops such as legumes with other crops, and livestock with other crops in diversified farming systems to enhance overall farm productivity. This will reduce food insecurity and poverty among rural farm households and the entire rural population.

These results indicate that to improve crop-livestock productivity through diversification, and reduce the effect of climate variability, it is imperative to provide the enabling environment that will facilitate and encourage production of these output combinations among smallholders in Ghana. The empirical results enhance the literature by providing empirical evidence of the complementary synergies and economies of diversification in integrated farming systems and, hence, make recommendations for improving these farming systems.

The peer review history for this paper is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2019-0274.

The agricultural sector in the USA has experienced significant structural changes. For accommodating farm business, households have diversified their operations adopting various strategies—agricultural, structural, environmental, and income strategies. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors influencing farmer’s diversification strategies while taking into account the simultaneous decision-making process.

This study uses a nation-wide farm household data from the US. The diversification decisions are analyzed using multivariate probit regressions.

The study suggests that agricultural, structural, environmental, and income diversification strategies are interlinked. Specifically, results indicate that, on one hand, environmental and income diversification strategies are positively interlinked. On the other hand, agricultural and structural diversification strategies are positively interlinked. Additionally, the factors representing location, farm, and farmer characteristics, farm type, and financial condition of the farm are major determinants in the choice of farm diversification strategies.

In this paper, diversification activities are broadly classified under four strategies: agricultural, structural, environmental, and income. Depending on the context and country, the definition and strategy set may need revision.

Strong complementary between diversification strategies suggests that studies analyzing farm household decisions and strategies need to account for the simultaneous decision-making process. As decisions are interlinked, separately analyzing one specific strategy may lead to biased estimates. Farm business households need to develop multiple skills and flexible capacities to tackle farming-related issues, including structural changes, risk management, and income enhancing activities. Improving employment opportunities for the rural farming population can stimulate structural diversification.

This paper contributes to limited literature about diversification by analyzing factors influencing different diversification decisions and finds interlinkage between decisions.

Enterprise diversification is a self‐insuring strategy used by farmers to protect against risk. This study examines the impact of various farm, operator, and household characteristics on the level of onfarm enterprise diversification. Evidence exists that larger farms are more specialized. Also, farmers who participate in off‐farm work, farms located near urban areas, or farms with higher debt‐to‐asset ratios are less likely to be diversified. In contrast, evidence suggests there is a significant positive relationship between diversification and whether the farm business has crop insurance, is organized as a sole proprietorship, or receives any direct payments from current farm commodity programs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Farming in Bangladesh is confronted with various types of uncertainties, which contribute to farmers’ income volatility over the years. As a result, cereal, mainly rice, which is a less riskier crop remained dominantly planted in the current farm plan. But the return generated from rice cultivation has not been able to improve the livelihood of the poor, as rice profitability is low compared to some profitable but risky crops like jute and vegetables. To investigate the behavioral pattern of the farmers towards risk, Dhaka division, largely known as central region of Bangladesh, is selected. The prevailing farm plan of Dhaka division is compared with the efficient one at the current level of expected return in order to check whether the current farm plan is risky or otherwise. Quadratic and MOTAD as well as linear programming techniques have been employed for the analysis. The result of the study reveals that the prevailing farm plan in Dhaka division is risky compared to the efficient plan. Since the current return level is low, the study has recommended that more jute and vegetables should be planted to achieve higher remuneration.

The purposes of this paper are to examine the actual conditions of the problems of poverty in rural areas in Inner Mongolia, to clarify the problems involved in the measure to fight poverty through promotion of dairy farming and to propose policies for future measures to fight poverty.

Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed, such as the estimation of production functions of agriculture in Inner Mongolia over the period 1998‐2004, the interview analysis and questionnaire survey for case studies. The different roles that three models play in poverty reduction such as the government assistant dairy farming, the enterprise entry dairy farming, and the multiple management dairy farming are discussed.

The paper confirms the growth of the corporate‐participating dairy farming contributes significantly to the development of the regions. It also clarifies the problem of the government‐aided dairy farming with its low profitability caused by insufficient input of fodder and the necessity to select management policies according to the natural conditions and resources available in individual regions, such as a shift toward recycling‐oriented beef cattle management in multiple dairy farming.

The paper adds insight into the promotion of dairy farming and poverty reduction in Inner Mongolia.

It is difficult to develop an overall picture of the practice of management accounting (MA) in farms and farm enterprises (FEs) because little research has been published on the topic, and these studies are mostly discrete and unconnected to the others. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available research, develop an explanatory framework for MA practices in farming entities and identify some major avenues for future research on the topic.

This paper uses systematic literature review methods. After an extensive database search and an examination of references/citations, 41 empirical journal articles published between 1964 and 2016 are identified, described and analyzed in this research paper.

The findings reveal that the practice of MA in farms is subject to information problems and that the empirical research on this topic largely lacks a theoretical explanation. Therefore, the explanatory framework of MA practices in farming entities reveals that these practices are subject to influencing factors such as familism, government farm policies, market competition, technological changes, the seasons and the weather/climate.

The overall limited findings on the practice of MA in FEs indicate that caution should be taken when generalizing the current knowledge on the use of MA practices in other organizational forms to farming entities. Moreover, future research should draw on explicit theories to explain empirical results.

This paper is the first comprehensive literature review of studies on MA practices in farms and FEs.

This study aims to analyze the factors that determine non-farm enterprise diversification among farm households in Ethiopia. It extends the analysis by examining enterprises and using pooled data, which has the capacity to generate more accurate outcomes. The existing empirical evidence has focused on all non-farm activities, based on single period, single region data. Much of the existing empirical evidence is based on small-scale and location-specific sample surveys that do not demonstrate the characteristics of aggregate populations.

The empirical analysis was conducted using a quantitative method. To cater to the censoring nature of participating in non-farm enterprise activities, a panel data double-hurdle model is used to a representative sample of 3,594 Ethiopian rural households.

The study finds that the age of household head, household size, distance to the market, social capital and access to credit, are determinants for owning one or more non-farm enterprises. The level of income from these enterprises is then determined by the age and education level of the household head, household size, agricultural equipment, distance to markets and access to credit.

This study brings to light factors that influence households to participate in non-farm enterprises and the determining factors for the income level.

Non-farm activities are an important source of household income and a driver of development. This paper provides empirical evidence on factors that determine enterprise ownership using panel data.

Understanding complex farming organizations is important in the USA given the rapid consolidation of the agricultural production sector. Multiple entity farms arise from a desire to enhance the ability to transfer the farm from one generation to the next, a desire to affect tax liability, and a desire to affect legal liability. To determine the extent of the multiple entity phenomena and the complications that multiple entities can cause in data collection, the purpose of this article is to address the importance of multiple entities in Kansas.

An overview of reasons leading to additional organizational complexity are discussed. Two case farms are presented to understand the depth of the complexity and how that complexity has implications for data collection.

The number of multiple entity farms is expected to continue to increase. Obtaining data through the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) will become more difficult as production agriculture increases the use of multiple entities. ARMS must reconsider how multiple entity organizations are handled. Possible solutions include an alternative system for data collection of multiple entity farms. Documenting the prevalence of multiple entity organizations in the production sector and tracing through how those organizations are currently handled is critical to understanding potential impacts on the current data collected.

The National Research Council completed a review of ARMS that addressed challenges in keeping the survey relevant into the future. However, research that examines the construction of financial statements and other information had not been conducted since the early 1990s. This study fills part of that gap.