Abstract
Italy is among the most important countries in Europe for milk production. The new European policies encourage a transition towards sustainability and are leading European dairy farms to follow new trajectories to increase their economic efficiency, reduce their environmental impact, and ensure social sustainability. Few studies have attempted to classify dairy farms by analyzing the relationships between the structural profiles of farms and the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability. This work intends to pursue this aim through an exploratory analysis in the Italian production context. The cluster analysis technique made it possible to identify three types of dairy farms, which were characterized on the basis of indicators that represented the three dimensions of sustainability (environmental, social, and economic sustainability) and the emerging structural relationships based on the structural characteristics of the dairy farms. The classification made it possible to describe the state of the art of the Italian dairy sector in terms of sustainability and to understand how different types of farms can respond to the new European trajectories.
Highlights
Was the fifth European country in terms of the quantity of milk delivered in 2019 with a total of 1,208,647 thousand tons [1]
Our sample consisted of 1211 farms, of which 95.5% were dairy farms and 4.5% were buffalo farms
This work aimed to define the types of farms in the dairy cattle sector in order to provide a detailed picture of the Italian situation and, at the same time, to create a classification of homogeneous groups of farmers based on their structural profiles from the point of view of sustainability
Summary
Was the fifth European country in terms of the quantity of milk delivered in 2019 with a total of 1,208,647 thousand tons [1]. Four regions produced almost 80% of the total milk in 2020: Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, and Piedmont. These areas produce larger quantities and have better efficiency compared to the others [3]. In 2018, the sector recorded a production value in the agricultural sector of approximately EUR 4.68 billion [4], while the turnover of the dairy industry was around EUR 16.63 billion [5]. These data show how the dairy industry is a fundamental asset for the national agri-food sector, representing
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