Productivity in the Sheep Sector

Previous papers at this conference over the years have dealt with trends in productivity in the total agricultural sector, the forestry sector and the dairy sector. Productivity indexes were developed by the Tornquist methodology that produces index numbers free of base year bias. Sources of data are the national accounts for the total agricultural and forestry sectors and designated farm surveys for the dairy and sheep sectors. The surveys are taken as representative of the whole in such calculations. In this paper we analyse the Meat and Wool Information Economic Service (MWI) survey of sheep and beef farms for the past 20 years and develop an index of whole farm productivity (total productivity) free of base year bias. Some technical comparisions are made with productivity trends in Landcorp which had a fairly similar product mix in the period concerned.