Estonian dairy farms’ technical efficiency and factors predicting it
Laen...
Kuupäev
2019
Kättesaadav alates
Autorid
Luik-Lindsaar, Helis
Põldaru, Reet
Roots, Jüri
Ajakirja pealkiri
Ajakirja ISSN
Köite pealkiri
Kirjastaja
Abstrakt
Milk production is a complex process whose efficiency depends directly on the inputoutput ratio and indirectly on the decisions made at farm and animal level. Decisions made about
farm hygiene, dairy cows’ milk yield, cows’ age at first calving etc. affect farms’ efficiency. The
aim of this study is to provide an understanding of the factors that affect dairy farms’ technical
efficiency. A two-stage approach was used in this study, consisting of a data envelopment
analysis (DEA) in the first stage, and classification and regression tree (CART) in the second
stage. DEA determined technical efficiency scores (TE), and CART enabled to detect the main
factors that influenced efficiency in dairy farms. The analysis studied at the Estonian national
level FADN dataset and Estonian Livestock Performance Recording data. 147 Estonian dairy
farms were included in this analysis, all of which are specialized in dairy production. DEA results
demonstrated that more than half of the farms (55%) were operating efficiently or rather
efficiently (TE ≥ 0.900). CART results revealed that the main variables determining efficiency
are milk yield per cow's lifetime (kg day-1
), feed costs (€ kg milk-1
), and somatic cell count
(SCC; 103 ml-1
). Milk yield per cow's lifetime is a complicated factor as it is influenced by a lot
of components (e.g. milk yield, number of lactations, age at first calving, and calving interval),
but if it is known at farm level, it is also a useful variable for predicting efficiency. Feed costs per
milk kg is an economic variable, i.e. lower costs are related with higher efficiency. Better hygiene
(lower SCC) is also related with higher efficiency. The analysis showed that integrating farm
accounts data, herd-level genetic information, and milk quality attributes enables to use more
specific factors to explain the variation of TE between dairy farms.
Kirjeldus
Article
Märksõnad
data envelopment analysis, classification and regression tree, dairy farms’ efficiency, articles