Farm efficiency related to animal welfare performance and management of sheep farms in marginal areas of Central Italy: a two-stage DEA model

Abstract

The development of specific actions to increase animal health and welfare is indicated as a strategy to improve the efficiency and sustainability of many livestock systems, including sheep farming. In this paper, efficiency measures are provided to confirm the hypothesis that farms that are higher-performing in terms of animal welfare and management are also more technically efficient. A two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach was adopted with the following twofold objectives: 1) to evaluate the efficiency and super-efficiency of 76 meatproducing sheep farms situated in marginal lands in central Italy, through DEA and Super-DEA (S-DEA) models; and 2) to assess the influence of animal welfare and management indicators on technical efficiency values through the application of a Tobit regression model. An overall efficiency performance varying within a range of 0.44-1 was estimated, with an average value of 0.80, implying a potential increase of 20% in terms of output production from both management and scale improvements. The 'pure' technical inefficiency was found to contribute three times more than scale inefficiency in determining the overall technical inefficiency. Adopting a more extensive farming system and increasing replacement rate were found to affect negatively the efficiency scores. On the other hand, having less than 5% of animals with body condition score beyond acceptable limits, presence of access control structures, well managed lambing pens, and dedicated feed stocking areas resulted in a positive influence on efficiency. Improvements in animal welfare aspects did not appear to be farm-scale-dependent. HIGHLIGHTSDEA and Super-DEA models were applied to assess sheep farm technical efficiency in Central Italy. An overall potential 20% increase in output production was estimated. Animal welfare factors were found to significantly affect efficiency performance.

A systematic literature review of data envelopment analysis implementation in agriculture under the prism of sustainability

“…Super efficiency was performed by 3 papers or 2% of total sample. Cecchini et al ( 2021 ) used this approach for minimizing the influence of extreme values to their final results when implementing an efficiency assessment on Italian sheep farms.…”

Assessing technical efficiency and its determinants for dairy cattle farms in northern Algeria: The two-step DEA-Tobit approach

“…In recent years, this method has gained increasing attention in various fields of research. Within this field, agriculture is one of the most recent application areas for DEA (Angón et al, 2015;Cecchini et al, 2021;Emrouznejad and Yang, 2018;Ullah et al, 2019).…”

Eco-Friendly Processing of Wool and Sustainable Valorization of This Natural Bioresource

“…Farming systems may be cost-effective, diminishing the pressure to choose between biodiversity preservation and economic development [30]. Modern technology may also help animal husbandry farms to become cost-effective [31][32][33]. The level of technology adoption determines the increases in the ecological aspects of the pastoral system [34].…”

“…Several papers provide information regarding the efficient management of sheep breeding. There are many factors influencing its efficiency, like the relations with stakeholders [35], socio-technical networks in the field [27], animal genetics [36], animal welfare [33], flock management [37], and pasture productivity [38].…”