1 Decisions systems: influencing farming families’

An understanding of farmers ’ decision-systems would help government agencies appreciate how best they could encourage farmers make strategic decisions that would lead to better natural resource management (NRM), including the maintenance of native biodiversity on their farms. An appreciation of decision-systems in general would help farming families and their advisors improve their strategic decision making capabilities. This paper outlines a decision-system theory we developed using the procedure for grounded theory from in-depth interviews with farming families. The theory helps explain farmers ’ perspectives on conserving biodiversity out of personal interest, compared with conserving biodiversity for business reasons. The decision-system theory outlined in this paper has six parts. The first five parts concern decision-making from the farming family’s perspective. Part one is a set of hierarchical stories that represented the life-long motivations (aspirations) of farming families. Part two is an understanding of how farm decision-makers creat