Financial risk on dryland farms in south-eastern Australia

The SMA system is shown to have the potential to become a practical and useful aid to all levels of farm management practice and policy.The results from a range of case studies suggest that current best-practice management systems, developed using current static methods of financial analysis, may be inappropriate and result in farmers adopting systems with unacceptable levels of financial risk, which yield sub-optimal financial returns. These analyses clearly show that farm viability depends more on minimising losses than maximising production, and it is these accumulated losses which threaten farm business survival and growth.