ABSTRACT
Economic analysis plays an important role in the development and adoption of low-input farming methods and systems. Economics provide the broad farm management perspective needed to incorporate both hard and soft data into a framework for assessing whether farmers are likely to be better off by adopting particular low-input systems. A major role of economics in low-input farming systems is to determine the present and necessary incentives for farmers to adopt low-input systems. Another role of economics is to help assess the impacts of various farming systems on society at large, including consumers of farm products and users of the environment. Research on the economics of low-input farming systems should be significantly expanded over the next decade. Systems have to be analyzed in different agroclimatic settings and with various assumptions about the external economic environment.
