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Abstract
Modern farming in Australia is no longer simple. Farms are large, multi-enterprise
businesses underpinned by expensive capital investments, changing production technologies,
volatile markets and social challenges. The complexity of modern broadacre
farming leads to the question: what is the nature of the relationship between farm business
complexity and farm profitability? This study uses bioeconomic farm modelling
and employs eight measures of complexity to examine the profitability and complexity
of a wide range of broadacre farming systems in Australia. Rank order correlations
between farm profitability and each measure of complexity show inconsistent relationships,
although the most profitable farming systems are found to be reasonably complex
on several criteria. Among the set of highly profitable systems are found some
characterised by less complexity. A commonly acknowledged feature of farm business
complexity is the annual workload of the farmer, yet the trade-off between farm profit
and this workload is found not to be large. A case is outlined where the farmer’s
annual hours worked could be reduced by 9 per cent for a 3 per cent reduction in farm
profit. If farmers’ workloads are proving problematic now, and in the future, then
agricultural R&D, service delivery and policy development will need to focus more on
being highly attractive to increasingly time-poor farm managers.