Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/62905

This study provides an economic analysis about risk aversion behavior, focusing on farmers' selection of varieties of wheat in upland farming areas in Tokachi, Hokkaido and clarified managerial factors that are considered to determine the aversion behavior. The main points mentioned in this paper are as follows; 1. The wheat acreage increased three times in recent two decades in Hokkaido. In every time, changes in variety are one of the major contributed factors. 2. Takune, a variety of wheat preferred by farmers in Tokachi, is preferred as a crop which enables farmers to take risk aversion behavior so that the higher the risk, the larger the ratio of Takune. Thus we can regard Takune as a crop which shows the degree of risk aversion. 3. In a logit regression analysis applied for Takune selection, the results show that it is correlated positively with farm size and negatively with age of the farmer. That means the larger the farm size and the younger the age, the more farms select Takune. Labor and productivity also have a positive correlation with Takune selection although farms without a successor and variance of yield of kidney beans show a negative sign. The results show that in general farmers who have better managerial condition tend to be risk averse. Consequently, it is reasonable to say that further increases in farm size would raise necessity of the risk spreading function in the upland farming management. This role of risk spreading function played by Takune would be one of the important managerial conditions for stable evolution of farm management in the future.