The Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and SCRI joined forces on 1 April 2011 to create The James Hutton Institute. It is the first Institute of its type in Europe and will make major, new contributions to the understanding of key global issues such as food, energy and environmental security.
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Characterising EU livestock systems according to economic and technical indicators - The case of EU sheep farming
S.W. Ashworth
Agricultural and Food Economics Department, Scottish Agricultural College, Auchincruive, Ayr KA6 5HW, UK.
Abstract
Characterising livestock production systems on the basis of economic and technical indicators is a complex process, as this paper will attempt to demonstrate. This is particularly the case in the sheep sector where production systems are far from uniform across the European Union. However, before trying to characterise through economic and technical measures let us first consider why one may wish to characterise livestock systems and having done that then to consider how economic and technical measures could be used to meet these objectives. Two main reasons for characterising systems present themselves. They are, firstly as a means of targeting policy measures and secondly, to predict and evaluate the effectiveness of these policy measures against a number of criteria. Thus, it is likely that any means of characterisation will have to be easily understood, simple to operate and pan-European in scope.
Traditional economic and technical measures have been used primarily for farm management purposes. They have therefore, concentrated on performance appraisal at both the physical and economic level. However, they have not really been designed for use in policy measures. Nevertheless, this does not preclude their use although problems may arise. These problems are likely to be associated with gaining satisfactory coverage across farm types and production systems, not only within countries but also across Member States.