Since the 1990s, the number of intensive dairy farms in Iran has rapidly increased to supply milk to the growing cities. As a result, total production of milk has increased, but scarcities still exist in some regions of the country. Since resources such as feedstuffs are limited, and considerable investment will be required to establish these new farms, the question of production efficiency in Iranian dairy farming seems an important one. Measuring the level of production efficiency, determining the sources of inefficiency, and proposing possible ways of improving the efficiency of the intensive dairy farms are the main aims of this study. In addition to simple measures of partial productivities and profitabilities, a stochastic transcendental frontier production function was estimated, using a single-stage approach to measure overall technical efficiency and its components, and a frontier profit function was used to measure the economic efficiency of individual intensive dairy farms. The latter function was evaluated first with the current distorted prices of milk and concentrates as well as the market prices of other dairy inputs and outputs. However, this frontier led to overestimation of economic efficiency due to ignoring input-price and output-price inefficiencies. To deal with this problem, the frontier was re-evaluated with expected prices defined as fractions of the observed prices of inputs and outputs. In order to investigate the way in which farmers combine dairy inputs, an index of allocative efficiency was also calculated and discussed. All the indices were then compared between the farms specified by factors such as herd size, proportion of pure cattle, etc. The results showed that production efficiency of the intensive dairy farms in Iran can be improved by expanding the proportion of purebred animals, particularly in large farms, and by using as much of the existing capacity of farms as possible.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:592099 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Bakhshoodeh, M. |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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