Resilience of dairy farms measured through production plan adjustments

Abstract

In this study, the resilience of farm production plan through different management adjustments was analyzed. For this purpose, a farm model based on mathematical programming was applied. Through organized workshops typical farms focusing on dairy production were defined through qualitative and quantitative classification. Data were obtained from various databases and expert assessments from the agricultural sector. Analysis of resilience was carried out for three of these typical dairy farms. Using the farm model, the production plan of each farm was reconstructed in the first step and then tested for possible deviations from the baseline. Gross margin was used as the main economic indicator. The results show that the typical farms have very different levels of efficiency and potential for improvement. Furthermore, it was found that all farms can achieve significantly higher gross margin only with improved feed quality, which indirectly leads to a lower need for purchased feed and consequently to lower variable costs and higher gross margin. The level of the latter is also significantly affected by the milk yield achieved, especially on larger farms. However, on smaller farms they can improve profitability more significantly by keeping dairy cows on pasture to a greater extent, which results in a reduction in harvesting costs.

Keywords

• animal breeding
• milk production
• economic analysis
• impact assessment
• mathematical programming