Abstract
The Agriculture Research Group On Sustainability (ARGOS) is investigating the social, environmental and economic consequences of different management systems in different farming sectors in New Zealand (for more information visit www.argos.org.nz). The sectors being studied include kiwifruit, sheep/beef and dairy, and the systems being studied include conventional, integrated and organic management. Twelve farms under each system are being studied. In addition, there are eight high country farms included in the study. As part of the ARGOS social objective, causal mapping was used to document how the participating kiwifruit orchardists described and explained the factors involved in their orchard systems, broadly defined to include economic, social and environmental factors. Participants identified which factors among those provided were important to the management and performance of their orchards and were asked to link these on a map. This method was first used in 2005 and then repeated with some modifications in 2008 in order to examine possible changes in orchardist’s mapping over time. In the latter three studies the method was applied in a slightly different way compared to the first kiwifruit study. In this report the revised method was applied to kiwifruit orchardists in 2008 so that a set of results using the same method is available for all the sectors studied.