Programme designed to assist in future-proofing hill country farmers and farms
To achieve this, the Hill Country Futures (HCF) Partnership programme, created various tools and resources to enable farmers to make impactful and enduring changes on-farm.
It was not enough to create these tools and resources, we also wanted to understand the value of these outputs for the hill country sector.
Impact of the HCF outputs and accompanying interventions were estimated
The QUICK (Quantifying and Understanding the Impact of Capability and Knowledge) framework was used to estimate the impact of the HCF outputs. QUICK combines intervention logic models with benefit-cost analysis using an agent-based approach informed by choice modelling.
If all the outputs generated by HCF were fully adopted, the benefits were predicted to have a present value of $275 million (up to 2040) for farmers.
Full adoption of all outputs is unlikely, so we assumed that each of the outputs developed by the HCF programme would have a 30% chance of successful uptake, and from this the expected value of the HCF programme’s benefits were estimated.
Benefits of the HCF programme will outweigh the costs by a factor of 13.5.
The modelling showed that profitability gains would account for 53% of the value created from the resources, followed by improvement in farmers’ physical and mental health (18%), the health of their land (13%) and their resilience to adverse weather (9%).
Keen to know more?
- Podcast (Value of the Hill Country Futures programme to farmers)
- An Agent-Based Approach to Quickly Valuing the Benefits of Agricultural Research and Extension
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to Adam Barker (Scarlatti) for taking the lead on this project for New Zealand’s sheep and beef farming community.