Typology, classification and characterization of farms for agricultural production planning

Abstract

Agricultural activity in Galicia, North West Spain, is carried out on farms that are characterized by a diversity of land use and production models, a variety of farm sizes, and considerable geographical dispersion. Any attempt of Agricultural Production Planning aimed at characterizing production models requires a method of analysing data and obtaining technicaleconomic results from farms in the different areas. Models based on average statistical data are limited because they represent farms that do not exist in reality. This study develops a methodology to characterize and group dairy farms into different types according to the following basic variables: land use, size classes and production systems. The information used in this study was microdata from the 1999 Census of Agriculture. The methodology developed was also applied to microdata from the 1989 Census of Agriculture, thus obtaining significant information about the evolution of agricultural activity. The tools used in the analysis were Microsoft Access and Excel, and an application that was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic. The methodology presented can be used to analyse the evolution of the sector or to model future trends.

Family dairy farms in the Podlasie province, Poland: farm typology according to farming system

“…These data can be compared with the results obtained by other authors in Poland or other countries. Economic data should allow the calculation of the gross margin, which is used by several authors (Álvarez-López et al, 2008;Gaspar et al, 2008;Ruiz et al, 2008) but will also be interesting to know the indicator of level of dependency with respect to external inputs that is used by other authors (Wroński et al, 2007;Szajner, 2009). Both indicators are very important to study the viability of agricultural systems.…”

The Challenge of Diffusion in Forest Plans: A Methodological Proposal and Case Study

“…In the year 2010, this reached 6,868,500 m 3 , which represents 50% of Spanish timber production and about 4.5% of that in the European Union [60]. Galicia is characterized by the presence of small forest owners [61,62], agricultural exploitation [63][64][65], and a mosaic of cropped and livestock-farmed and forested land [66]. For 40 years there has been an increase in the process of afforestation in different agricultural areas and in the abandonment of rural activities [67], together with a sharp decrease in population in rural areas [67].…”

Changes in the pastoral sheep systems of semi-arid Mediterranean areas: association with common agricultural policy reform and implications for sustainability

“…Farm groups were identified through a hierarchical cluster analysis using the Ward and centroid methods to delimit groups (Álvarez-López et al, 2008;Riveiro et al, 2013). The Euclidean, square Euclidean and Manhattan distances were calculated for each of these methods.…”