Agricultural Risk Analysis, Management and Information System

General introduction

This project aims to develop a comprehensive and user-friendly decision support tool to enhance farmers' decision-making in a context of risk and uncertainty. Farmers are increasingly subject to risk and uncertainty due to policy changes, restrictions on the use of crop protection measures, volatile prices, increasing debt-to-asset ratios, and more. Several of the existing instruments and measures to manage risk and uncertainty are either not being applied very often and/or their impact is far from clear.

Research approach

The project adopts a multidisciplinary research approach: (1) qualitative research to understand the decision making process of farmers in an ever changing and uncertain environment; (2) econometric studies elucidating the relationship between uncertain parameters (e.g., prices and production) and economic performance; (3) farm-level simulation investigating the impact of different strategies on the risk-return profile; (4) participatory development of a decision support tool; (5) economic-econometric research regarding specific case-studies such as "risk and sustainable farming", "the impact of scale enlargement on risk".

Relevance/Valorisation

The project aims to enlarge our practical knowledge concerning risk, how risks are perceived and managed by farmers and how to improve risk management. During the process, we adopt a participatory approach to develop tools to support the decision making process in the face of risk and uncertainty. The ultimate goal is the development of an interactive decision support tool.