Jaka Zgajnar

Jaka Zgajnar is an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the Chair for agricultural economics, policy, and law at the Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana. After graduating in Animal Science, he worked at the Biotechnical faculty as a young researcher. He obtained his Ph.D. in Agricultural economics in 2011.

He is the holder of the courses Introduction to the Economics of Agricultural Holdings, Economics of Livestock Production and Preparation of Production Plan at the Biotechnical Faculty, and Animal Health Economics at the Veterinary Faculty. In addition, he participates in the courses Methods of Optimization and Equestrian science.

The range of his scientific interest and professional expertise is broad and spans from farm management-oriented research (i.e. various aspects of production planning and optimization, allocation of scarce resources, risk management, and income risk analysis, analyzing the impact of agricultural policy measures at farm level), to animal health economics research (e.g. E. Coli in poultry production, BVD in cattle), to a special focus on economics in the horse industry and horse management and also some other topics related to horses. In his research, he applies different methods from the field of operation research, mainly from the field of constraint optimization (e.g. linear programming, goal programming, quadratic programming) and simulations (e.g. MCS).

Since 2012, he is Head of the Education and Research Centre for horse breeding Krumperk. This is an Equestrian center under the Biotechnical faculty, where they breed Lipizzaner horses, perform field exercises from different subjects, and also do research from different fields.

He attended his first IFMA Congress in Ireland and has been a regular participant since then. He is also a member of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE), the Slovenian Association of Agricultural Economics (DAES), and the Slovenian Society INFORMATIKA, the section for operation research (SOR).