El seguro de salud

Overall, survey respondents were slightly older, had slightly more experience in farming, and had higher levels of formal education than that observed in other studies (Fairweather & Mulet‐

Marquis, 2009; Fairweather et al., 2007; Pinochet Chateau, 2005; Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013). At the same time, while the proportion of survey respondents that were dairy farm owner- operators was a fair representation of the national figures (DairyNZ, 2014b), the proportion of sharemilkers was under-represented, and a new role category, the “farm owner-non-operator”, appeared in a relatively high proportion (20%). Consequently, the vast majority of survey respondents were farm owners (89%), regardless of their involvement in the operation of their farms. Moreover, respondents of this survey also had a high or very high influence on the long term business decisions (see Figure 4.2.1.5)

The differences in age observed between respondents in this survey and the national statistics described by Fairweather and Mulet‐Marquis (2009) and the study by Pinochet Chateau (2005) may be explained because the age statistics were captured in different years (2014 and 2006 and 2005 respectively), and, thus, demographics could have slightly changed in that period because of the ageing of farmers and fewer younger people entering the dairy farming industry. Yet, the eight years difference between when the studies were conducted may justify the difference in results in this area. However, more recent research (Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013) reported a similar age profile to the one observed for respondents in this survey.

Differences in farming experience between respondents in this survey and in Shadbolt and Olubode-Awosola (2013), and also the high percentage of farm owner-non-operators and low proportion of sharemilkers observed in this survey when compared to other studies (DairyNZ, 2014b; Pinochet Chateau, 2005; Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013) may be related to the time of the year in which the survey was sent out. The survey was sent out near calving, and younger farmers with less experience, or sharemilkers, may have needed more time to commit to on-farm duties and, therefore, may have decided to not participate in the survey due to their lack of free time. On the other hand, farmers with more farming experience, or non-operating farmers who did little on-farm work during this period may have had more free time to commit to the survey, thus deciding to participate in the survey. These differences in free time may have reflected differences in experience and current situation in survey responses. To support this idea, five out of the 23 surveys that were sent back with no answered questions had comments apologising for not participating and explaining that that this was because they were busy calving. Likewise, this

may be a plausible explanation of the higher percentage of businesses in the “entry of next generation” or “exit” stages in the business life cycle in this survey compared to that reported by Shadbolt and Olubode-Awosola (2013).

A key characteristic of most survey respondents was that they had high or very high influence on long-term decision-making. This is important to note because it means that the strategies implemented by these farmers were likely to be the result of their own decision-making, and thus a reflection of their own personal attributes.

With regard to the farm businesses production figures collected in this survey, these were typical of dairy farms in New Zealand. However, there seemed to be slight differences relating to the regional distribution of farm businesses (slightly more cows in the Central Plateau, Bay of Plenty and South Canterbury regions and fewer cows in Waikato and North Canterbury compared to national statistics). A first, a plausible explanation for the differences could be that respondents might have confused the location of their farms with respect to the categories used in this survey, particularly for those regions that were close. For example, respondents might have chosen to locate their farms in the Bay of Plenty rather than Central Plateau and this resulted in an over-representation of cows in Bay of Plenty. The same might have happened between the South and North Canterbury categories.

A second possible explanation for differences in the location could be that there were respondents with multiple operations or respondents were asked to answer location regarding only one farm business (the one in which they had the most influence), which could have resulted in the over-representation of cows in some locations over others. This could be the case of respondents who might have had farm businesses in the Waikato or Central Plateau as well as in South Canterbury but responded to the survey in relation to their Canterbury farm. Although there was little data to support this idea, one important figure that supports this is that 34% and 47% of respondents in the Waikato and Central Plateau, respectively, were owner operators with multiple farm business. Nevertheless, because the differences between the sample and the national statistics were not large, and because the objective of this research was more focused on farmer attributes rather than farm attributes, the sample was considered to be sufficiently representative of the dairy farm population.

The commonality between the risk profiles of respondents in this survey and the results reported by Shadbolt and Olubode-Awosola (2013), describing a relatively high proportion of farmers

typology described in the literature as cautious strategists by Olsson (1988) or pragmatic entrepreneurs by McCarthy (2000). These types present a representative description of the dairy farmer population in New Zealand (Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013).

With regard to respondent resilience profiles, results showed that farmer responses to questions regarding their willingness to accept uncertainty and to change, locus of control, self-efficacy, open-mindedness, strategic thinking and sense-making varied slightly. However, there was evidence of a bias reflecting positive attributes for some of the questions on each attribute. This may have been related to a poor adaptation of the questions to the context of farm management. Unfortunately, there was no information from other studies to compare the results from this survey with. Nevertheless, further PCA weighted questions based on the variability in responses gave less weighting to those of low variability, reducing the effect from these questions in the final scores for resilience attributes.

As for respondent perception of the sources of risk in the farm business environment, in general, survey responses on risks in the industry suggested that the major sources of change in the last 10 years came from regulatory risks which presented a major threat to farm businesses. In contrast, the most volatile risks were market risks, with the two risks identified with the highest volatility being input price and availability and milk price, which presented a threat and an opportunity and a threat for farm businesses, respectively. No other studies have analysed the farm business environment using a similar approach. This approach is useful for understanding how farmers perceived the environment in term of change and volatility of different risk sources and could be used to identify these factors as plausible drivers for strategic decisions implemented for farm businesses.

Finally, despite some small differences, respondent profiles with respect to their risk management strategies were a fair representation of the results reported in previous studies (Martin, 1994; Pinochet-Chateau et al., 2005a; Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013). This indicated that respondents in the survey were typical of farmers in previous studies in their risk management strategies, particularly when compared with the most recent research (Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013). Moreover, high importance was placed on strategies relating to strategic management, indicating entrepreneurism, which relates to people who are in constant search for opportunities (McCarthy, 2000). It also aligns with a purposeful cautious defensive strategy (Olsson, 1988), which is also typical of dairy farmers in New Zealand (Shadbolt & Olubode-Awosola, 2013; Shadbolt, Olubode-Awasola, Gray, & Dooley, 2010).