Large Scale Dairy Farming in The Netherlands: Economic Evaluation and Environmental Impact

摘要

Increasing scale is an ongoing process in Dutch dairy farming. Average farm size in the Netherlands is about 70 cows. True benefits of scale however occur at sizes above 500 cows. A sudden growth to larger scale will bring the benefits of scale withinreach in a couple of years. In the 'Cowmunity' project, three farmers developed Jive new concepts for a 1000 cow farm somewhere in the Netherlands. These new concepts were developed along two axes: grazing versus zero-grazing and technology versus labour. The Animal Sciences Group was asked to perform an assessment study on these concepts. Objective of this study was to evaluate the concept, list the possible bottlenecks and suggest solutions. This paper describes the differences between the concepts and the critical success factors focussing on economic results and environmental impact. With average prices for rent, slurry removal and roughage, land in own property combined with grazing is economically the most favourable option. The landless concepthas the highest result at low prices for roughage and slurry removal and high prices for rent. Zero-grazing with self sufficiency for roughage is only attractive compared to the landless option when rent is lower than EUR 400 per ha or when prices of slurry removal are higher than EUR 10 per m~3 slurry. Environmental impact focuses on mineral balances for nitrogen and phosphate. Surplus of nitrogen and phosphate is highest in the concepts with grazing. General conclusions are that dairy farming on thisscale doesn 't necessarily lead to unacceptable impacts on the environment and grazing can, on this scale, lead to the highest net profit.