Can the use of digital technology improve the cow milk productivity in large dairy herds? Evidence from China's Shandong Province

Abstract

IntroductionImproving milk productivity is essential for ensuring sustainable food production. However, the increasing difficulty of supervision and management, which is associated with farm size, is one of the major factors causing the inverse relationship between size and productivity. Digital technology, which has grown in popularity in recent years, can effectively substitute for manual labor and significantly improve farmers' monitoring and management capacities, potentially addressing the inverse relationship.MethodsBased on data from a survey of farms in Shandong Province in 2020, this paper employs a two-stage least squares regression model to estimate the impact of herd size on dairy cow productivity and investigate how the adoption of digital technology has altered the impact of herd size on dairy cow productivity.ResultsAccording to the findings, there is a significant and negative impact of herd size on milk productivity for China's dairy farms. By accurately monitoring and identifying the time of estrus, coupled with timely insemination, digital technology can mitigate the negative impact of herd size on milk productivity per cow.DiscussionTo increase dairy cow productivity in China, the government should promote both small-scale dairy farming and focus on enhancing management capacities of farm operators, as well as large-scale dairy farms and increase the adoption of digital technologies.

Enhancing Dairy Farm Welfare: A Holistic Examination of Technology Adoption and Economic Performance in Kahramanmaraş Province, Turkey

“…Farms with advanced technology demonstrated higher technical, allocative, and cost efficiencies. This underscores the potential of technology adoption to enhance farm productivity and profitability, aligning with previous research highlighting the positive impact of technology on dairy farm efficiency [12,23].…”

“…Additionally, research has extensively focused on efficiency analysis and its determinants within dairy cattle farms [14,[17][18][19][20][21]. While extant literature has delved into various facets of technology adoption and efficiency analysis within dairy farming, significant gaps persist, particularly concerning the interplay between technical efficiency and technology adoption [22,23]. Moreover, the relationship between efficiency and technology adoption in the Turkish context remains underexplored, necessitating comprehensive research endeavors to elucidate these dynamics.…”

Technology of production and primary processing of milk in farm conditions

“…A significant part of scientific studies, the authors of which studied the influence of technological aspects on the productivity of cows in the conditions of individual farms, substantiated their analysis only with the involvement of individual indicators of milk yield and reproduction: the number of animals (Tse et al, 2018;Ivanyos et al, 2020), milk protein and fat content ( Varpikhovskyi, 2019;Lutsenko et al, 2021), reproductive indicators (Lyashenko et al, 2022;Qi et al, 2022) and others. Recently, more and more attention has been paid in publications to data on the safety of milk, in particular, the number of somatic cells in milk from different farms.…”

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“…A significant part of scientific studies, the authors of which studied the influence of technological aspects on the productivity of cows in the conditions of individual farms, substantiated their analysis only with the involvement of individual indicators of milk yield and reproduction: the number of animals (Tse et al, 2018;Ivanyos et al, 2020), milk protein and fat content ( Varpikhovskyi, 2019;Lutsenko et al, 2021), reproductive indicators (Lyashenko et al, 2022;Qi et al, 2022) and others. Recently, more and more attention has been paid in publications to data on the safety of milk, in particular, the number of somatic cells in milk from different farms.…”