The hot and cold cow
This thesis examines if Swedish dairy farms between 2005-2016, that diversify into unconventional income opportunities, can cushion a possible negative effect from increase in the mean temperature in Sweden. Dairy cows are sensitive to increases in temperature and could suffer from both heat and col...
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| Formato: | Second cycle, A2E |
| Lenguaje: | sueco Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2022
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| Acceso en línea: | https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/17458/ |
| Sumario: | This thesis examines if Swedish dairy farms between 2005-2016, that diversify into unconventional income opportunities, can cushion a possible negative effect from increase in the mean temperature in Sweden. Dairy cows are sensitive to increases in temperature and could suffer from both heat and cold stress. This might cause effects on dairy production because the energy is diverted to maintain body temperature instead of producing milk.
According to IPCCs fifth assessment report (2014) there are evidence of an increasing global temperature. Between 1951-2012 the global mean surface temperature increased with 0.72C. The warming has shown to have been largest in the Scandinavian areas. Diversification could work as an insurance for future changes in the environment. When a farm introduces new income sources into the business it could create a more stable stream of income. Dairy farms need to be able to survive in a changing environment and bringing diversification into the system may be a possible solution to secure framers income and availability to food.
This thesis contributes to the literature by incorporating income diversification and temperature to evaluate the effect on dairy farm productivity from an economic perspective. The method used to analyze is a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) for an unbalanced panel data of 684 dairy farms located all over Sweden. The model consists of 3947 observations and includes the variables temperature, Simpson’s index of diversification and an interaction term between diversification index and temperature. The temperature data is divided into seasons of winter, spring, summer and autumn.
The results show that there are both negative and positive effects from increased mean temperature dependent on the season and an indication of a positive effect from income diversification on output. Further the interaction term displays a positive sign for spring and summer temperature which have a negative effect on output by themselves. This indicates that a negative impact from changes in temperature on dairy productivity could be reduced trough income diversification. Though, the results should be interpreted with caution because of weaknesses in the data. |
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