Milk price volatility- does it affect the relative profit ranking of dairy herds in Ireland?

摘要

The abolition of EU milk quota affords an opportunity for dairy farmers to increase milk output, but it is also associated with a greater degree of farm-gate price volatility for globally traded milk products. For pasture-based systems in Ireland, access to land that can be utilised for grazing by the milking herd is now the principal limiting factor to herd expansion. Some farmlet and modelling studies, having controlled for pasture use efficiency differences, have reported quadratic effects of stocking rate on farm profit (MacDonald et al, 2011), and sensitivity to milk and feed prices (Ruelle et al, 2017), resulting in a moderate degree of re-ranking depending on scenarios tested. The current study examined the degree to which the relative profitability per hectare of dairy farms in Ireland changes to milk price fluctuations.