Farm Enterprise Selection In A Risky Environment

This guide is intended to help extension workers better understand the concept of risk, the situation where risk occurs and management strategies that can be used to reduce, or at least soften, its effect. It is hoped that the guide will be useful in assisting extension workers to provide farmers with advice on the kind of risk management strategies that they can employ to deal with risk in their day-to-day operations. In this way extension workers can help farmers recognize and understand the risks that they are likely to face and assist them in making better farm management decisions that reduce the negative effect of the risks encountered in farming.

The third and final instalment of Peter Nuthall's "Farm Business Management" series, this volume teaches the practical skills needed to manage a farm, such as risk analysis, budgeting, cost benefit analyses and much more. The key characteristic of this book is its ability to simplify the complex subject of business management into a clear, accessible volume tailored to the topic of farming, by using engaging techniques such as worked examples to fully explain the complex decision making tools necessary for this discipline.

"Dabalen, Paternostro, and Pierre investigate the differences in outcomes (earnings and consumption) between individuals (households) who participate in the nonfarm sector and those who do not. They use propensity score matching methods where they create appropriate comparison groups of individuals and households. First the authors find that nonfarm self-employed individuals in rural Rwanda have significantly higher earnings than farm workers and nonfarm formal employees. Second, they show that the benefits to nonfarm self-employment are much higher among the nonpoor than among the poor. Third, the authors show that diversified households-- those with a farm and a nonfarm enterprise-- are less likely to be poor. Finally, farm households who do not participate in the market have significantly lower consumption levels than households that do. However, the benefits to market participation appear to matter less for the poor than for the nonpoor. The authors find little difference in expenditures between market participants and nonmarket participants for comparable households in the bottom 40 percent of the expenditure distribution. This paper-- a product of the Poverty Reduction Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network-- is part of a larger effort in the network to understand rural nonfarm employment determinants"-- World Bank web site.