Improving Performance and Manure Management in the French Pig Sector: A Three-stage Analysis

Nitrogen emissions from agriculture are considered as an important problem, motivating an evaluation of the performance of French pig farms in improving manure management. This article develops a methodology that allows for a joint evaluation of farms¿ economic and environmental efficiency from various productive structures. A three-step approach is developed. First, a Cluster Analysis is implemented. It provides a description of main French pig farm structures. Farms are grouped into clusters with similar structural characteristics regarding land, labour and production diversification versus specialisation. Second, a Data Envelopment Analysis is implemented at the level of each cluster. This nonparametric frontier analysis allows for efficiency benchmarking. It provides a score on the economic performance of farms and on their efficiency in manure management in a way that reduces the detrimental impact of their productive activity on the environment. At last, an aggregate procedure is developed to measure the performance at the cluster level and at the sector level. This bottom-up approach allows us to provide an overall indicator of French pig farms¿ performance in both an economic and environmental direction and to identify the percentage of this performance that depends on farms¿ characteristics or on the structure of the pig sector. Main results show that improvements both in economic and environmental terms are limited for farming systems specialized in pig production without any change in their production structure or technology of production. Farming systems that are diversified can contribute to an increase in production and a decrease in nitrogen surplus by implementing their current production technology in a most efficient way.

PIOT-LEPETIT Isabelle; 

2010-11-23

Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

JRC54997

978-1-61668-424-2,