The New Zealand data covers only specialised meat and wool farms, thus the analysis for this country focuses on risks in livestock farming3. This differs from other countries where databases include mixed farms, and the risk assessment is mainly focussed on crop farming.4 The fact that data for New Zealand concerns only livestock farms somewhat limits the scope of the analysis. Thus, no attempt has been made to assess output risks, as was done for other countries, due to the difficulty of disentangling “normal” variations in the numbers of livestock sold that arise from stock cycles from any other output variations. The farm-level risk analysis for other countries also included stochastic simulations of risk management strategies, this is not done for New Zealand as the model used is not adapted for livestock farming simulations. These limits notwithstanding, the analysis of farm-level data provides interesting insights into farming risks in New Zealand.