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  • Research topics
    • About my region: regional profiles
    • Agricultural outlook
      • Agricultural Commodities Report March 2025
      • Australian crop report
        • Australian Crop Report March 2025
      • Commodities and trade data
      • Historical agricultural forecast database
      • Definitions
      • Previous reports
    • Biosecurity
      • Biosecurity economics
        • Cost of established pest animals and weeds to Australian agricultural producers
        • Potential economic consequences of African swine fever in Australia
        • A benefit-cost framework for responding to Varroa
        • Benefits of increased access to minor use chemicals
        • Biosecurity control strategies for red imported fire ants
        • Biosecurity response options for black-striped mussel
        • Consequences of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak
        • Consequences of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak - 2022 update
        • Economic consequences of a scrapie outbreak in Australia
        • Economic impacts of Xylella fastidiosa on the Australian wine grape and wine-making industries
        • Estimating the value of Australian biosecurity arrangements for equine influenza since the 2007 outbreak
        • Farm gate value of biosecurity
        • Potential impact of the wheat steam rust strain Ug99 in Australia
        • The impacts of Xylella fastidiosa on Australian horticulture and the environment
      • Biosecurity sciences
        • Potential distribution of the invasive marine species Magallana ariakensis (Suminoe river oyster) in Australia
        • Potential distribution of the invasive marine species Didemnum vexillum (carpet sea squirt) in Australia
        • Potential distribution of the invasive marine species Potamocorbula amurensis (Amur River clam) in Australia
      • Biosecurity engagement
    • Climate and drought
      • Agricultural Data Integration Project
      • Farm performance and climate
      • Measuring drought risk
    • Fisheries
      • Fishery status reports
      • Fisheries and aquaculture statistics 2022
        • Australian fisheries and aquaculture production
        • Australia’s trade in fisheries and aquaculture products
          • Market access improvements: A case study of stone fruit exports to China
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        • About this report
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        • Economic concepts in Australian fisheries and aquaculture statistics
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        • Australian fisheries and aquaculture outlook
        • Australian fisheries economic indicators
      • Fisheries research
        • Commonwealth Fisheries Harvest Strategy Policy and Commonwealth Fisheries Bycatch Policy Implementation Review
        • Shark Assessment Report 2022
        • Analyses to support the review of the Southern Squid Jig Fishery harvest strategy
    • Food demand in Australia
      • Trends and issues 2018
      • Trends and food security issues 2017
    • Forests
      • Forest economics
        • Australian forest and wood products statistics
        • Forest economic research
          • Australian wood volumes analysis
          • A framework for developing medium term projections of traded wood products
          • Economic potential for new plantation establishment in Australia
          • Future opportunities for using forest and sawmill residues in Australia
          • Illegal logging regulation: analysis of regulated importers by business size
          • Productivity and efficiency of the Australian sawmilling industry
          • Responsiveness of demand for structural pine to changes in timber and steel prices
          • Short-term forecasts of selected wood product sales volume: Method and assumptions
          • Upscaling the Australian softwood sawmill industry
        • Australian plantation statistics update
        • Plantation and log supply
        • National wood processing survey
      • Forest sciences
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      • Forests overview
    • Invasive species
      • National Feral Pig Current Distribution in Australia
      • Distribution and impacts of established pest animals and weeds
      • Exotic invasive species with environmental impacts
      • Prioritising targets for biological control of weeds
      • The National Priority List of Exotic Environmental Pests, Weeds and Diseases dataset
      • The state of weeds data collection in Australia
      • Wild dog research
    • Agricultural workforce
      • At a glance
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    • Land Use
      • Land use of Australia 2010–11 to 2020–21
      • Catchment scale land use of Australia and commodities - Update December 2023
      • Catchment scale land use profiles
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      • ABARES Farmland Price Indicator
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      • Australian marine pest network analysis
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      • Making general surveillance work
        • General surveillance case study overviews
        • Guidelines for general surveillance programs
        • Literature review: Understanding general surveillance as a system
        • Research report: Making general surveillance programs work
        • Stocktake of general surveillance initiatives
      • Natural resource management
      • Pest animals and weed management survey
      • Recreational boat operators’ self-management of biofouling in Australia
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      • General surveillance program design, monitoring and evaluation guide
    • Farm performance
      • Dairy farm performance
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      • Disaggregating farm performance statistics by size
      • Previous research
    • Trade
      • Climate, sustainability & agricultural trade
      • Trade facilitation, barriers and NTMs
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        • Foreign Direct Investment in Australian Agriculture
      • Dashboard (beta)
    • Water
      • Community vulnerability and adaptive capacity in the Murray Darling Basin
      • The impacts of further water recovery in the southern Murray–Darling Basin
      • 2024: Environmental water trade – Making every drop count.
    • Agricultural forecasting
      • Changes to reporting of marketing year data
      • Farm share and price spread
      • Farmers' terms of trade: Update to farm costs and prices paid
      • Forecasting national grain stocks in times of drought
      • Seasonal climate scenarios for medium-term forecasts
      • Summary of ABARES agricultural forecasting
      • The future of public sector forecasting in Australian agriculture
    • Working papers
      • Technical improvements to GTEM: Sticky livestock capital and resources costs for land sequestration and abatement technologies
      • A micro-simulation model of irrigation farms in the southern Murray-Darling Basin
      • A model of spatial and inter-temporal water trade in the southern Murray-Darling Basin

Working papers

ABARES publishes working papers to provide its research teams with the opportunity for external peer review of ongoing research projects.

These papers are technical in nature and written in the style of a journal paper. Some of these working papers may be submitted to and accepted by a journal, or they may continue development as part of a research report intended for formal publication as an ABARES product.

ABARES Farmland Price Indicator - Measurement Framework

This report presents the underlying measurement framework used for the ABARES Farmland Price Indicator. It outlines the use of administrative data supplied by CoreLogic in a stratification model to estimate average Australian farmland prices. It replaces an earlier version that is now obsolete due to recent methodological updates.

Published 28 November 2024

Total factor productivity of Australian vegetable farms

This paper is the first to propose and apply a method for the estimation of Australian vegetable productivity and provides a foundation for future efforts to estimate productivity for Australian horticulture.

Published 30 April 2024

Technical improvements to GTEM: Sticky livestock capital and resources costs for land sequestration and abatement technologies

This working paper presents methods to improve analysis and policy advice relating to the impacts of climate policies in computable general equilibrium models, with relevance to agriculture, forestry and land use. The improvements include better representation of livestock herds and the inclusion of resource costs associated with the abatement and land-based sequestration activities, making the model more representative of real-world economic relationships.

Analytical distributions and statistics for managing import pathway risk using the continuous sampling plan CSP-1

Australia imposes regulations on goods that arrive in the country and have the potential to introduce exotic pests and diseases.

In this paper, we extend that foundational work to include uncertainty and inspection sensitivity, both of which are highly relevant to Australian border operations where samples from arriving consignments, with low but variable levels of contamination, are selected and inspected.

We provide analytical distributions and statistics for all processes of the CSP-1 cycle, including expressions for variance, for the probability that leakage occurs, and for the volume of leakage conditional on occurrence. The effect of inspection sensitivity is included and explicit.

Analytical distributions and statistics for managing import pathway risk using the continuous sampling plan CSP-2 and CSP-3

Australia imposes regulations on goods that arrive in the country and have the potential to introduce exotic pests and diseases. 

Continuous sampling plans (CSP) are operational biosecurity systems commonly implemented at the border to manage risk and, simultaneously, keep regulatory inspection costs low.

Currently, CSP-1 systems are underpinned by the results and proposed design-criteria in the classical work of Dodge (1943), and CSP-2 and CSP-3 systems are underpinned by that in Dodge and Torrey (1951).

This paper provides fast, accurate and accessible solutions to replace the need for simulations in many applications the continuous sampling plan 2 and 3 systems used in the management of Australia's biosecurity system. This will aid in enhancing system management decisions.

Discount rates and risk in the economic analysis of agricultural projects

There is considerable debate around discount rates and the treatment of risk in economic analysis. Since the 1980s, most government economic appraisal guidelines in Australia have adopted a consistent approach set out in government economic appraisal guidelines. However, support for this position has eroded over time.

Critics have argued that the discount rate should be updated to reflect changing economic conditions and suggested, more fundamentally, that the theoretical basis of the standard approach is flawed. If these criticisms hold, we are likely to be underestimating the merits of long-term projects versus short term projects and the merits of projects that reduce risk versus projects that increase risk, with implications for the quality of investment decisions. This report explores both sides of the debate to provide rigorous and practical guidance on how economists should approach discount rates and the treatment of risk in their analysis of agricultural projects.

Published 1 April 2022

Non-tariff measures: A methodology for the quantification of bilateral trade effects of policy measures at a product level

As tariffs in Australia's major trading partners have fallen, trade negotiators are increasingly focussed on the non-tariff elements of trade agreements. A negotiator is faced with the policy challenge of determining what non-tariff measures (NTMs) and products to focus on in bilateral and multilateral negotiations. This means that qualitative and quantitative advice on the trade effects of different measures can inform one aspect of a negotiator’s multifaceted decision-making process to prioritise and allocate scarce negotiating resources. This paper outlines a defensible application of theory that leads to a ‘proof of concept’ quantification methodology for product-level bilateral trade effects of NTMs.

Published 23 February 2022

Simulating the effects of climate change on the profitability of Australian farms

Recent shifts in the Australian climate including both higher temperatures and lower winter rainfall, have had significant effects on the agriculture sector. Despite these recent trends, there remains uncertainty over the future climate and its potential impacts on Australian farm businesses. In this study, a statistical model of Australian cropping and livestock farms is applied to simulate the potential effects of climate change on farm profits.

This farm model is combined with a range of downscaled projections for temperature and rainfall by 2050. The results provide an indication of adaptation pressure: showing which regions, sectors and farm types may be under greater pressure to adapt or adjust to climate change. The future climate scenarios produce a wide range of outcomes, with simulated changes in average farm profits (without adaptation) ranging from -2% to -32% under an ‘intermediate’ global emissions scenario (RCP4.5) and -11% to -50% under a ‘high’ global emissions scenario (RCP8.5), relative to the reference period climate of 1950 to 2000.

Published 29 July 2021.

A model of spatial and inter-temporal water trade in the southern Murray-Darling Basin

This paper presents an economic model of water markets and irrigated agriculture within the Australian southern Murray-Darling Basin (sMDB). A unique data set, detailing irrigation activity, water supply and prices over the period 2000-01 to 2018-19, is used to estimate a set of water demand functions by catchment region and irrigation activity. The resulting model can realistically simulate the market prices of water, carryover volumes and trade flows across the sMDB along with irrigation water use and area planted by region and activity.

The model is applied to simulate distributions for water prices in the sMDB, and to estimate the economic benefits of interregional water trading and carryover. Water markets are estimated to generate benefits to water users in the sMDB of $117m per year on average (around 12 per cent of the market value of water rights in the region). The benefits of water markets are reduced by around half in the absence of carryover.

Defining drought from the perspective of Australian farmers

The Defining drought from the perspective of Australian farmers working paper presents a new drought indicator as  an alternative to traditional rainfall measures.

The new indicator is found to more accurately reflect the effects of drought on farm profits than simple rainfall measures, accounting for the unique circumstances of each farm and the effects of movements in domestic commodity prices (i.e. high grain and hay prices).

The Defining drought risk report also presents data on farmer self-assessments of drought. These data show differences in farmer perception of drought once variation in climate conditions has been controlled for. This includes a tendency for farmers in New South Wales and Queensland to be more likely to self-assess as ‘in-drought’ than farmers in Western Australia. There is also a trend for current farmers to be less likely to assess as in-drought than farmers in the past.

Farmpredict: a micro-simulation model of Australian broadacre farms

ABARES has developed a new model, farmpredict which can simulate the effects of price and climate variability on the production and profitability of Australian broadacre farms. farmpredict simulates the production of outputs, the use of inputs and changes in farm stocks at a farm level, given information on farm fixed inputs, input and output prices and prevailing climate conditions.

A micro-simulation model of irrigation farms in the southern Murray-Darling Basin

This paper presents a new farm level microsimulation model of irrigation activity within the southern Murray-Darling Basin (sMDB), developed by ABARES on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

ABARES working papers are available for your use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence except content supplied by third parties, logos and the Commonwealth Coat of Arms.

Inquiries about the licence and any use of this document should be emailed to Copyright.

Use of ABARES material under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence requires you to attribute the work (but not in any way that suggests that ABARES endorses you or your use of the work).

ABARES material used 'as supplied'

Provided you have not modified or transformed ABARES material in any way including, for example, by changing the ABARES text; calculating percentage changes; graphing or charting data; or deriving new statistics from published ABARES statistics — then ABARES  prefers the following attribution:

Source: Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences

Derivative material

If you have modified or transformed ABARES material, or derived new material from those of ABARES in any way, then ABARES prefers the following attribution:

Based on Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences data

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Page last updated: 28 November 2024

We acknowledge the continuous connection of First Nations Traditional Owners and Custodians to the lands, seas and waters of Australia. We recognise their care for and cultivation of Country. We pay respect to Elders past and present, and recognise their knowledge and contribution to the productivity, innovation and sustainability of Australia’s agriculture, fisheries and forestry industries.

Artwork: Protecting our Country, Growing our Future
© Amy Allerton, contemporary Aboriginal Artist of the Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung and Gamilaroi nations.

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