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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 pervasive regulation. 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. Using the farmer’s annual hours worked as a measure
of complexity that affects current farm management, the trade-off between profit and this
measure of complexity is found not to be large. A case is outlined where the farmer’s
annual hours worked could be reduced by 9 percent for a 3 percent 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 much more on
being highly attractive to time-poor farm managers.