Farm organisation and efficiency in Hungarian dairy farms

Bakucs, Lajos Zoltán and Fertő, Imre and Fogarasi, József and Tóth, József (2012) Farm organisation and efficiency in Hungarian dairy farms. MILCHWISSENSCHAFT-MILK SCIENCE INTERNATIONAL, 67 (2). pp. 147-150. ISSN 0026-3788

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the technical efficiency of Hungarian dairy farms between 2001 and 2008 using stochastic frontier analysis. We focus on three specific issues: the impact of the European Union accession, the role of farm organisation and the effect of farm size. Our results highlight the role of farm classification in explaining the performance of dairy farms. We find that individual farms are not equivalent to family farms as is usually assumed in previous research. The average size of individual farms is considerably bigger than that of family farms. Our results confirm that mean performance of individual and family farms is weaker than of the corporate farm organisation including companies, cooperatives, intermediate and non-family farms irrespective of the methods, product group and country. The simple mean comparison estimation shows that there are significant differences in farm performance among farms in terms of legal form or farm organisation. However, panel regression just partly confirms these results. Although our estimations indicate that the impact of family and individual farms on farm performance is rather negative, some other farm type coefficients remain not significant.

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