The Agriculture Research Group On Sustainability (ARGOS) is investigating the social, environmental and economic consequences of different management systems in different farming sectors in New Zealand (for more information visit www.argos.org.nz). The sectors being studied include kiwifruit, sheep/beef and dairy, and the systems being studied include conventional, integrated and organic management. Twelve farms under each system are being studied. As part of the ARGOS social objective, causal mapping was used to document how the participating dairy farmers described and explained the factors involved in their farming systems, broadly defined to include economic, social and environmental factors. Participants identified which factors in the 41 provided were important to the management and performance of their farms and linked these together in the form of a map.