Emma Dillon

Animal health is a key factor affecting the economic efficiency of the dairy industry. Improvements in animal health are also of relevance to society more broadly, given important implications for animal welfare, food safety and quality. Although the economic gains of best practice with regard to animal health have been well documented, many farmers are not adopting optimal herd management techniques. This paper utilises nationally representative farm-level data from Ireland for 2013 to identify drivers and barriers to the adoption of best practice with regard to on-farm mastitis management. Exploratory factor analysis is used to derive measures of farmers’ attitudes towards animal health and mastitis and econometric techniques are employed to empirically assess the influence of these on the uptake of beneficial herd health management practices. A number of focus groups were also undertaken to complement the analysis. This paper concludes that farmers’ attitudes towards animal health are not a key driver in the uptake of best practice, although perceived disease risk is of relevance. A number of interesting issues arise in identifying barriers to the uptake of best practice, these include the possibility of routine inertia, i.e., farmers do not deviate from the routine developed around mastitis prevention until there is an indication of infection, as well as constraints around the availability of labour and time. Farmer behaviour with respect to mastitis management can thus be considered as reactionary as opposed to precautionary. This research highlights the valuable role of the extension agent but concludes that engagement around knowledge transfer and technology adoption is particularly complex.

Using a nationally representative survey of farm operators in Ireland, this study examines the effect of non-pecuniary benefits from farm work on labor allocation choices. Results suggest that non-pecuniary benefits affect both the decision to enter the off-farm labor market and also once that decision is made, the amount of time spent working off-farm. We find our derived variable representing non-monetary benefits associated with farm work to have a substantial impact similar to the effect of other more widely reported personal and farm structural variables such as the age of the farm operator, farm size, and farming system. The existence of these non-pecuniary benefits serves to increase the implied wage to farmers for their farm work. This in turn can lead to allocations of labor that would seem suboptimal from a purely financial point of view. Rural development policies aimed at creating off-farm opportunities could fail unless returns to off-farm work are high enough to compensate the farmer for losing the benefits associated with the farming lifestyle. From a methodological perspective, our analysis indicates that failure to model off-farm labor allocation choices as a two-part process may lead to some incorrect conclusions regarding the effect of certain explanatory variables. Outside of explaining farmers’ off-farm labor supply it would be useful to incorporate farmer perceptions regarding the non-pecuniary benefits from farming in economic models of farm behavior across a range of activities as this could lead to much more accurate predictions of farmers’ responses to policy changes.