The Decision to Finish Cattle on Pasture: An Ethnographic Approach.

Conventional cattle enterprises send grain-finished beef to a commodity market. Pasture-finishing offers farmers better returns in an alternative "niche" market with different costs, uncertainties and risks. Such enterprise decisions are not well-structured problems soluble with classical decision analysis. Instead, they require an ethnographic process of "framing" from a personal viewpoint. Here we examine the natural and cultural setting of beef cattle enterprise systems, and their time frame for action planning and implementation. We present four brief case studies of farmers who practice pasture-finishing. An "ethnographic decision model" (EDM) asks farmers about their personal, material, social and financial resources. In behavioral decision theory, a parallel line of research is "naturalistic decision making" (NDM), focused on the proficiency of decision makers dealing with ill-structured problems, incomplete information, uncertainty, and urgency. Pasture-finished beef production can he an addition to a risk-reducing portfolio of enterprises. The key is classification of the herd into two groups, destined either for the niche market or for the commodity market. When forage growth conditions are unfavorable, the niche group receives preference and commodity animals get second best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]