Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Managing Wildlife Risk: How Do You Decide If Bambi Must Go?
Today’s poultry confinement buildings probably don’t let many foxes inside. But that may be only one species of wildlife which are under some degree of control. Agriculture is the conversion of nature into an economic opportunity, and for many years in the past and in the future, nature includes some furry critters that make agriculture a bit more challenging than we would like it to be. Yes, Bambi is a risk that has to be managed.The primary risks in agriculture are production, marketing, financial, legal, and human resource. But a significant subset of production risk includes wildlife. We’ve all had deer or Canada geese trim off rows of soybeans, and deer certainly will nibble at bales of hay. In some parts of the country, sheep have to be protected from wolves and coyotes. The loss of a commodity to wildlife is a reduction of revenue, and your risk management plan must address that say a group of economists and ranch management specialists at the University of Wyoming. While their focus may be targeted at agriculture in western states, their recommendations can be applied to any part of the Cornbelt.
Interestingly, the Wyoming specialists separate their recommendations from the typical explanation of wildlife damage management. Instead they focus on wildlife risk management, which is management of the potential for damage, and they empathize with you, since your decisions have to be made before the damage actually occurs, and have to be made with uncertainty. To get started, they suggest identification of seven management steps.
1. Identification of the risk is extensive and includes damage to crops that may make them unmarketable. It also includes spreading of diseases of wildlife to domesticated livestock. Additionally it includes predation among the production risks. But there are also marketing risks such as vaccination requirements, fencing, and other deterrents. Add on institutional risks that include laws protecting certain species of wildlife and your liability when the wildlife moves onto your property. Finally, there is human resource risk that requires management should your employees or family catch diseases spread by wildlife.
2. The second management step is to analyze the risks; and making the critical decision to which degree each source of risk is managed. The two risk management principles are determining the likelihood of the risk occurring and assessing the consequence if the peril does continue.
3. Each risk has to have an assignment of priority and whether it will be managed further or ignored. Risks with a negative expected benefit from management should not be managed. It is not always obvious which will generate the highest expected benefit.
4. Wildlife risk management alternatives are the same as any other risk management decision. You can avoid them, such as grazing livestock where there are fewer predators. You can transfer them, such as buying insurance against livestock disease. You can reduce them, such as vaccinating against diseases carried by wildlife. And you can assume the risk, if it returns higher revenue.
5. The prior steps set the stage for identifying an optimal management plan, and you must keep in mind that it is rarely profitable to and sometimes impossible to eliminate all risks. In a hypothetical wildlife disease scenario, if you vaccinate your livestock and the disease is present, your outcome is more profitable than if the disease were not present. If your decision was to not vaccinate, your outcome is well more profitable if the disease were not present than if it was present. Cornbelt farmers can compare such a scenario with the application of fungicide to ward off soybean rust, not knowing whether it will become a risk. But livestock producers in the Cornbelt must also be aware of the potential for increasingly larger herds of deer potentially spreading disease to cow-calf herds.
6. The next step is to implement the risk management plan, but since circumstances may change from year to year, or even daily, the risk management plan must be monitored and adjusted, which becomes step #7.
Summary:
Wildlife may generate social benefits, and create profitable opportunities for a farming operation if they can be controlled such as duck or goose hunting. However, geese can also destroy crops and such risks have to be managed by a thorough process of identifying and evaluating the risk and whether management will be beneficial or too costly. After deciding on an alternative, and implementing it, the risk must be monitored and adjustments made to ensure success.
Posted by Stu Ellis on 05/11 at 01:55 AM | Permalink