Sustainable agri-food production
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Browsing Sustainable agri-food production by Subject "agricultural productivity"
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Item Quantifying land fragmentation in Northern Ireland Cattle Enterprises(MDPI, 2022-03-06) Milne, Margaret Georgina; Byrne, Andrew William; Campbell, Emma; Graham, Jordan; McGrath, John; Kirke, Raymond; McMaster, Wilma; Zimmermann, Jesko; Adenuga, AdewaleFarmland fragmentation is considered to be a defining feature of Northern Ireland’s (NI) agricultural landscape, influencing agricultural efficiency, productivity, and the spread of livestock diseases. Despite this, the full extent of farmland fragmentation in cattle farms in NI is not well understood, and little is known of how farmland fragmentation either influences, or is influenced by, different animal production types. Here, we describe and quantify farmland fragmentation in cattle farms for all of NI, using GIS processing of land parcel data to associate individual parcels with data on the cattle business associated with the land. We found that 35% of farms consisted of five or more fragments, with dairy farms associated with greater levels of farmland fragmentation, fragment dispersal and contact with contiguous neighbours compared to other production types. The elevated levels of farmland fragmentation in dairy production compared to non-dairy, may be associated with the recent expansion of dairy farms by land acquisition, following the abolition of the milk quota system in 2015. The comparatively high levels of farmland fragmentation observed in NI cattle farms may also have important implications for agricultural productivity and epidemiology alike. Whilst highly connected pastures could facilitate the dissemination of disease, highly fragmented land could also hamper productivity via diseconomies of scale, such as preventing the increase of herd sizes or additionally, adding to farm costs by increasing the complexity of herd management.Item Unpacking Total Factor Productivity on Dairy Farms using Empirical Evidence(MDPI, 2022-02-04) Olagunju, Kehinde Oluseyi; Sherry, Erin; Samuel, Aurelia; Caskie, PaulThis study examines the farm-level factors that influence differences in total factor productivity (TFP) on dairy farms. To this end, a fixed-effects regression approach is applied to panel data for dairy farms obtained from the Farm Accountancy Data Network for Northern Ireland over the period of 2005 to 2016. The findings are largely consistent with existing empirical evidence, showing that herd size, milk yield, stocking density, and share of hired labour have a positive and statistically significant impact on TFP, while labour input per cow, purchased feed input per cow, and share of direct payments in total farm output have a negative and statistically significant impact. The more complex relationships, namely age, education, and investment, have been unpacked using interaction terms and nonlinear approximation. The impact of age is negative, and the drag on productivity grows as age increases. Capital investment and education both have a positive impact on farm-level TFP, as well as on their interaction. Policy recommendations on strategies and best practices to help dairy farms tackle productivity constraints are suggested