Publisher's Synopsis
This study of agricultural change simultaneously deals with farm planning, i.e. the constant adaptation to changing circumstances at the level of the individual farm firm, and conditional forecasting, i.e. the analysis of alternative agricultural and environmental policy views and their impact.;Following a general introduction, setting out the objectives and scope of the study, the work reviews and assesses the relevance of a farm economic approach to research on agricultural change; discusses the modular system MIMOSA (MIcro MOdelling to Singulate changes in Agriculture); presents an assessment of six scenarios; looks at the identification of representative farm types for the population of 864 specialized crop production farms in the North East Polder in the Netherlands; discusses the structure and data use of the environmental economics LP model; presents the results of LP computations for the most important farm type in the North East Polder (type IV), representing 239 of the 864 farms in the population; presents an analysis of adaptation, ie whether and when the optimal LP solutions would be realized by the entities in a specific farm category was added for conditional forecasting; and explores the applicability of the farm economics approach for planning and conditional forecasting.
