Sheep and Beef Production Costs Across New Zealand: Introducing the Spatial Dimension

Motu is currently developing a dataset of production costs relating to different rural land uses, which we can use to help explain historical land-use trends at a Territorial Authority level. The Meat and Wool Economic Service farm survey provides a rich database containing physical and financial data for New Zealand sheep and beef farms including detailed information on average farm expenditure, from at least 1980. But while this dataset provides extensive information for 8 farm classes and 5 regions, the actual location of the farms within each class is not known. So, we have developed an algorithm that generates a map of potential farm classes utilising supplementary information on farm location from QVNZ and a land productivity map developed by Baisden (2006) at Landcare Research. This map can be used to map any information contained with the farm survey reports.