During large Q fever outbreaks in the Netherlands between 2007 and 2010, dairy goat farms were implicated as the primary source of human Q fever. The transmission of Coxiella burnetii to humans is thought to occur primarily via aerosols, although available data on C. burnetii in aerosols and other environmental matrices are limited. During the outbreak of 2009, 19 dairy goat farms and one dairy...

The cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on 755 USA dairy farms from the year 2000. The estimated frontier function is much flatter than the composite cost curve, and although the frontier cost of production decreases with farm size, that cost reduction is not as pronounced as a cost curve that includ...

Citation: Marton SMRR, Lüscher G, Corson MS, Kreuzer M and Gaillard G (2016) Collaboration between Mountain and Lowland Farms Decreases Environmental Impacts of Dairy Production: The Case of Swiss Contract Rearing. Front. Environ. Sci. 4:74. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2016.00074 Collaboration between Mountain and Lowland Farms Decreases Environmental Impacts of Dairy Production: The Case of Swiss Contr...

Citation: Markussen MV, Pugesgaard S, Oleskowicz-Popiel P, Schmidt JE and Østergård H (2015) Net-Energy Analysis of Integrated Food and Bioenergy Systems Exemplified by a Model of a Self-Sufficient System of Dairy Farms. Front. Energy Res. 3:49. doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2015.00049 net-energy analysis of integrated Food and Bioenergy systems exemplified by a Model of a selfsufficient system of Dairy F...

A case study of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation (CVPS) Cow Power program examines the economic feasibility for dairy farms to convert cow manure into electricity via anaerobic methane digestion. The study reviews the mechanism for CVPS, dairy farms, electricity customers, and government agencies to develop and operate the program since 2004, examines the costs and returns for the...

Farm animals have been suggested to play an important role in the epidemiology of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) in the community. The purpose of this study was to evaluate risk factors associated with C. difficile dissemination in family dairy farms, which are the most common farming model in the European Union. Environmental samples and fecal samples from cows and calves were collected...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact on technical inefficiency of smallholder dairy producers when they formally participate in a milk supply chain. Here the stochastic production frontier and technical inefficiency effects model are estimated based on the data gathered from 800 smallholder dairy farms in Pakistan. The results suggest that the technical inefficiency of the parti...

In recent decades, the dairy sector has shown a global tendency toward intensification. This structural change may have significant effects on farm efficiency and, consequently, on the economic results of the farms. The goal of this study was to offer an empirical analysis of the effect of intensification on dairy farming. To do this, we first classified a sample of dairy farms according to the...

A section of the Kansas Dairy Producers' Needs Survey evaluated needs related to education on reproductive management and the most common reproductive management practices used on Kansas dairy farms. Of the 312 surveys mailed to dairy producers, 70 were returned fully completed. Results indicate that producers need education on the topic of reproduction and that reproductive management practice...

Reproductive performance has an important effect on economic efficiency in dairy farms with short yearly periods of breeding. The individual factors affecting the outcome of an artificial insemination have been extensively researched in many univariate models. In this study, these factors are analysed in combination to create a comprehensive multivariate model of conception in Irish dairy cows....