In the “World of Cows”, dairy farmers run their farms and interact with each other, the surrounding agricultural landscape, and the economic and political framework. The model serves as an exemplary case of an interdependent human-environment system.

With the model, users can analyze the influence of policies and markets on land use decisions of dairy farms. The land use decisions taken by farms determine the delivered ecosystem services on the landscape level. Users can choose a combination of five policy options and how strongly market prices fluctuate. Ideally, the choice of policy options fulfills the following three “political goals” 1) dairy farming stays economically viable, 2) the provision of ecosystem services is secured, and 3) government spending on subsidies is as low as possible.

The model has been designed for students to practice agent-based modeling and analyze the impacts of land use policies.

This Python module contain a function that is able to test the ergodicity of a given agent based model. It is sufficient to produce one long time series and many smaller time series. The function uses

This is a stationarity test, it tests whether a given moment is constant during the time series (null hypothesis). The Wald Wolfowitz nonparametric fitness test is applied to time series.