Agricultural Risk Analysis, Management and Information System (ARAMIS)

This project aims to develop a comprehensive and user-friendly decision support tool to enhance farmers' decision-making in a context of risk and uncertainty. Farmers are increasingly subject to risk and uncertainty due to policy changes, restrictions on the use of crop protection measures, volatile prices, increasing debt-to-asset ratios, and more. Several of the existing instruments and measures to manage risk and uncertainty are either not being applied very often and/or their impact is far from clear.

The project adopts a multidisciplinary research approach: (1) qualitative research to understand the decision making process of farmers in an ever changing and uncertain environment; (2) econometric studies elucidating the relationship between uncertain parameters (e.g., prices and production) and economic performance; (3) farm-level simulation investigating the impact of different strategies on the risk-return profile; (4) participatory development of a decision support tool; (5) economic-econometric research regarding specific case-studies such as "risk and sustainable farming", "the impact of scale enlargement on risk".

The project aims to enlarge our practical knowledge concerning risk, how risks are perceived and managed by farmers and how to improve risk management. During the process, we adopt a participatory approach to develop tools to support the decision making process in the face of risk and uncertainty. The ultimate goal is the development of an interactive decision support tool.