Cash Crop Projects

agri benchmark Cash Crop is running a number of special projects which are listed below.

Ongoing Projects

Typical agri benchmark farms and value chains: Exploring farming systems, farm and value chain economics, finance and market integration for the GIZ projects BRIA, PIA and CARI

In 2012, the GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für international Zusammenarbeit) together with private sector representatives has started projects on the improvement of food and nutrition security, sustainable value chains and rural development in selected Asian and African countries. One key prerequisite for a successful project is a basic understanding of (a) the current farming systems and the respective economic status of farms (b) technical and respective financial needs of growers to improve production (both in quantitative as well as in qualitative terms) and (c) growers status in finance.

In collaboration with local partner agri benchmark will provide the respective information for the following projects:

Better Rice Initiative Asia (BRIA) – Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines
Competitive African Rice Initiative (CARI) – Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Burkina Faso
Potato Initiative Africa (PIA) – Kenya, Nigeria

A focus will be set on the following questions:

How do typical farming systems look like today in the key regions for producing the relevant crops (rice and potatoes) in terms of production systems and economics of (a) individual crops and (b) the whole farm (c) the farm household and (d) the whole value chain?

Contact: Tanja Möllmann and Friederike Rösner

Case study: Economic and Environmental Modelling of Crop and Beef Production using agri benchmark data in Brazil

This project is in collaboration with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria as well as with the Center for Advanced Studies on Applied Economics (CEPEA) as the on-the-ground partner in Brazil. The project aims to improve the accuracy of these models through an innovative concept based on typical farm-level data, ultimately building a bottom-up approach.

Economic and environmental models are commonly used to depict reactions of specific sectors and ecosystems to certain changes in market conditions, legal framework, etc. However, most of these models are based on top-down approaches that use endogenous parameters to estimate important variables to represent farmers’ management decisions (e.g. seeding and harvesting dates).

Currently agri benchmark production system data is being used to understand farmers’ management decisions within biophysical models – e.g. the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model, as well as providing a baseline for the development of an engineering costing model (AgriCostModel), which attempts to estimate production costs according to regional conditions and given production systems.

Mato Grosso state, Brazil was selected as a first pilot site.

Contact: Samuel Balieiro