The influence of weather conditions on dairy production

Abstract

Relatively little attention has been paid in the economics literature to the effects of meteorological conditions on milk production. Meteorological variables can be expected to affect milk production through their impact on the productivity of cows and the production of foodstuff. Rather than including meteorological variables as inputs in the milk production process, we propose a production function where these variables affect the productivity of cows and the production of forage, thereby indirectly affecting milk production. Using production and meteorological data from the Spanish region of Asturias corresponding to 383 dairy farms observed during a six-year period from 2006 to 2011, the results from our estimated production function show that meteorological variables have a significant impact on milk production. We find that milk production is higher under warm weather conditions due to improvements in forage production.JEL classifications: D24, Q12, Q54

Climate resilience programmes and technical efficiency: evidence from the smallholder dairy farmers in the Brazilian semi-arid region

“…However, temperature shocks are the main threat to the farmers' efficiency. Our findings confirm the importance of agro-climatic conditions on total factor productivity (Demir & Mahmud, 2002;Mukherjee et al, 2013;Njuki et al, 2020Perez-Mendez et al, 2019.…”

Climate change and productivity of northeastern dairy farms

“…Using proprietary farm-level data from six northeastern states between 2010 and 2020, we apply a stochastic frontier (SF) translog production model using alternative measures of weather and find that farmers in this region are generally more technically efficient than suggested in previous studies and that extreme weather impairs technical efficiency considerably more than suggested by previous studies with older data sets or that are national in scope. We also find a benign effect of heat on feed production, which is consistent with Perez-Mendez, Roibas, and Wall (2019) for dairy production and on the effects of climate change on crops in colder areas (Jägermeyr, Müller, Ruane et al 2021), such as the Northeast. Additionally, we find that dairy farms in this region exhibit significant increasing returns to scale and labor-augmenting technological changes, which support the tendency of the sector to become more consolidated and less labor-intensive.…”

“…Understandably, previous studies in the animal science and agricultural economics literature (e.g., Key and Scneeringer 2014;Mukherjee, Bravo-Ureta, and De Vries 2013) focus on the effect of heat stress on cows. However, given that dairy farm operations in the Northeast region, as in many other areas of the world, rely in large part on home-grown feed, such as corn silage and hay, and that feed is by far the dominant input, the effect of climate change via feed input is bound to also affect productivity (Perez-Mendez, Roibas, and Wall 2019).…”

Latent Class Modelling for a Robust Assessment of Productivity: Application to French Grazing Livestock Farms

“…We include the share of permanent grassland following Kellermann and Salhofer ( 2014) who considered an a priori (non-latent) classification where farms are split into two groups, one consisting of farms that rely on permanent grassland and the other group made up of fodder-crop farms. Regarding weather characteristics, in a recent paper Perez-Mendez et al (2019) stressed the indirect role played by weather variables on land and animal productivity. The authors included the weather variables in the production function, but this is not possible with our specification since these authors have used a translog production function (with nested sub-functions).…”