Cooperative considerations for a mobile resource that transcends property boundaries

There are environmental advantages to the commercial harvesting of kangaroo over domestic stock. Kangaroo, however, are able to jump fences and move among properties with ease. Consequently, questions of ownership and the equitable distribution of profits arise. We model a cooperative where two neighboring ranches experience rainfall equally but asynchronously each year. A kangaroo population roams freely among the properties to graze. Through harvesting, the population can be regarded as constant. In a cooperative, the location at which harvesting occurs is irrelevant but significant differences in the consumption of resources will affect the profit sharing arrangements between the property owners. Results indicate that the resources consumed on each property with the same total primary production may differ depending on the timing of rainfall. On average, however, the population consumption on each property is independent of the intra‐annual differences in rainfall distribution and hence primary production. Recommendations for Resource Managers The mobile nature of kangaroos should not be an impediment to their sustainable utilization for commercial purposes. Spatial differences in the timing of the first rainfall in a season will affect the time a roving kangaroo population spends at each location. Hence in a cooperative these differences will affect the contribution of each ranch to the total secondary production of the cooperative. Over the long term if there is no mean difference in the start of the rainfall season between two ranches then the annual fluctuations in this difference will not affect the contribution of each ranch to the cooperative enterprise. For the purpose of distributing profits, a cooperative should focus attention on any differences in the longer‐term primary production of each property.