Land-based or landless dairy farms? Preliminary insights from Greece

摘要

During the last 15 years significant changes have been witnessed in the Greek dairy cattle sector. Smaller farms arereplaced by large, highly intensive ones. Within this intensification process, dairy cattle do not graze but are fed indoors,with feeding costs standing for a very high percentage of total production costs. This paper provides some preliminaryevidence from a farm survey regarding the economic implications of producing feedstuff on-farm (land-based) asopposed to buying from markets (landless farms). Although the former strategy is considered to provide economicbenefits and flexibility to farms, this is not confirmed by a descriptive technical and economic analysis. The results showthat farms producing part of their feeds achieve limited variable cost savings, but they are burdened with excessive lossesin terms of labour requirements and land use costs (paid or implicit). On the contrary, farms buying feedstuff exclusivelyfrom markets produce with significantly lower costs. The paper concludes that the issue of choosing the preferredfeeding strategy is rather complex, requires further analysis with statistical and econometric methods and needs toconsider system -, farm - and farmer-specific characteristics, as uniform conclusions cannot be derived.