Dynamic sustainable productivity growth of Dutch dairy farming.

Liyun Zhu,Alfons Oude Lansink,Carlos Alberto Zúniga-González

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264410

Abstract

The economic, environmental and social sustainability of Dutch dairy farms have attracted increasing societal concern in the past decades. In this paper, we propose a recently developed dynamic Luenberger indicator based on the by-production model to measure dynamic productivity growth in the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability of Dutch dairy farms. Subsequently, we investigate the statistical associations between productivity growth and socio-economic factors using the OLS bootstrap regression model. We find that dairy farms have suffered a decline in dynamic sustainable productivity growth, especially in the environmental dimension where it is more pronounced than in the economic and social dimensions. Furthermore, we find that both technical and scale inefficiency change contribute to the decline of environmental productivity growth. Specialization and government support are associated with a higher economic and environmental sustainability productivity growth, and with, a decreased growth of social sustainable productivity. We found no significant association between the age of the oldest entrepreneur, financial structure, farm size or cost of advisory service and dynamic productivity growth in the three sustainability dimensions. The results provide insights into potential pathways towards improving the three pillars of sustainability.

Highlights

The concept of sustainable agricultural production has become key to policy recommendations in the European Union and elsewhere in the past decades
The dynamic technical inefficiency decreased by 0.9%, which suggest that the farms on average used the existing production technology less efficiently
Our results suggest that over the entire study period, the Dutch dairy farms’ economic sustainability productivity did not change, whereas, dynamic social and environmental sustainability productivity change decreased by -0.3% and -1.1%, respectively

Summary

Introduction

The concept of sustainable agricultural production has become key to policy recommendations in the European Union and elsewhere in the past decades. Dairy farms that use more fertilizer inputs, may put pressure on the environment through air, water and soil emissions [2]. The nitrogen surplus on many dairy farms results in leaching of soil nitrate to groundwater and loss of nitrous oxide [3]; P2O5 surpluses above 5Kg/ha/year increase the risk of P losses to water [4]. Animal welfare and animal health in dairy farming have been the subject of increasing societal concern [6]. National governments and stakeholders within the supply chain have reacted to these increasing societal concerns by introducing environmental regulations on emissions and the use of animal manure, and by introducing animal welfare concepts

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Conclusion