Deer farmers' attitudes to fencing waterways

Farmers' attitudes to disease risk management in England: a comparative analysis of sheep and pig farmers.

The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) identified practices to reduce the risk of animal disease outbreaks. We report on the response of sheep and pig farmers in England to promotion of these practices. A conceptual framework was established from research on factors influencing adoption of animal health practices, linking knowledge, attitudes, social influences and pe...

Measuring Risk Attitudes among Mozambican Farmers

Although farmers in developing countries are generally thought to be risk averse, little is known about the actual form of their risk preferences. In this paper, we use a relatively large field experiment to explore risk preferences related to sweet potato production among a sample of farmers in northern Mozambique. We explicitly test whether preferences follow the constant relative risk aversi...

Fast Fencing

We consider very natural “fence enclosure” problems studied by Capoyleas, Rote, and Woeginger and Arkin, Khuller, and Mitchell in the early 90s. Given a set S of n points in the plane, we aim at finding a set of closed curves such that (1) each point is enclosed by a curve and (2) the total length of the curves is minimized. We consider two main variants. In the first variant, we pay a unit cos...

Nutrient Pollution: A Persistent Threat to Waterways

Effect of Poverty on Risk Attitudes of Farmers in Benue

The Nigerian agriculture is characterized by low productivity, low farm incomes and low levels of technological adoption and use of inefficient production techniques. This poor state of Nigerian agriculture is related to farmers’ attitudes towards risk in the adoption of new production techniques, as well as risk in the production and socioeconomic environment. Having realized that poverty is a...