Development of a system to produce a map of agricultural profit for Australia

Policy makers in the agricultural sector are confronted with challenges which might drive land use change and ultimately agricultural profitability to a substantial degree. The challenges include questions around climate variability, demographic changes, use of land for bio-fuel production and ensuring an increase in food production. As profitability triggers many agri-business decisions, knowledge about the existing socio-economic landscape and the economic profile of a region as well as potential impacts on profits provides useful contextual information when agricultural policies are designed. Given the upcoming challenges and their associated uncertainties it is important to ensure that a map of agricultural profit can be re-produced in a scenario and simulation setting which will allow the exploration of uncertainties around agricultural profits as well. If agricultural production information is updated, e. g. by an agricultural census, and land use information changes by the provision of an updated land use map, agricultural profits change as well and these changes can be mapped. There is however currently no flexible system in operation which allows for a consistent update of a map of agricultural profits in Australia or elsewhere. This paper describes a process that facilitates the production of maps of agricultural profit and presents a map of agricultural profit for Australia for the year 2005/06. The process involves a complex data architecture that accounts for linkages between data that have been collected by a variety of institutions across different scales such as information about land use, productivity as well as production costs and revenues. All information can be comfortably queried and query results can be forwarded for immediate processing and subsequent visualisation in a geographic information system (GIS). To facilitate the production of profit maps in the future, the system provides flexibility regarding an update of new economic information but it can also be linked to maps that show an updated distribution of land use. A map of agricultural profit on a large scale will help the understanding of profit trends in space. It will help to identify regions that have a lower economic profile and will inform decisions regarding the design of regulatory policies. As these maps are developed using national scale data, we do not recommend using the results at the farm level. The proposed system is well suited to be used in various land use management and economic scenarios and will represent a step forward regarding scenario impact assessment on agricultural profits.