“…The specific objectives of this paper are (1) to determine growth patterns and survival trends of French dairy farms between 1988 and 2006, specifically the size distribution of dairy farms; and (2) to identify the main factors of change, focusing in particular on the role of agricultural policies: namely decoupled payments, milk quotas, and YFSPs, in addition to milk yield and milk market price. We apply a nonstationary Markov model (Hallberg 1969;Zepeda 1995aZepeda , 1995b, estimated with maximum entropy formalism (Karantininis 2002) to model the effects of factors influencing the numbers and the sizes 1 The "Département" is one of the large districts into which, France is divided for administrative purposes, and it correspond to the NUTS3 level of the European geographical classification. In France, transfers of dairy quota between "Départements" are not permitted, although in principle up to 20% of the national reserve allocations may be managed at national level (Alliance Environnement 2008).…”