Open AccessConservation versus traditional cattle farming - the economic implications
Author(s) -
John Hearne,
Petri Uys
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
orion/orion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2224-0004
pISSN - 0259-191X
DOI - 10.5784/7-1-472
Subject(s) - stocking , subsistence agriculture , revenue , agriculture , incentive , business , agricultural science , natural resource economics , agricultural economics , economics , agroforestry , environmental science , geography , microeconomics , forestry , archaeology , accounting
In many areas of South Africa traditional subsistence farming practices entail overstocking of cattle. The resulting damage to the veld can be arrested only by providing the farmers with economic incentives to reduce stocking densities. In this paper cattle offtake strategies are investigated with a view to maximising revenue at lower stocking densities. This is achieved by developing a mathematical model which predicts the revenue generated by a given strategy. It is shown that although the model is nonlinear, a transformation can be made to enable optimisation by linear programming