Abstract
The 4.3 million French suckler cows represent more than one third of all European suckler cows and supply around 60% of the beef production in France. They also participate in rural development, as few economic alternatives to livestock farming exist in these production areas and they help in maintaining large areas under grassland which favors biodiversity and limits pollution and erosion (Le Goffe 2003), even if their complete environmental impact should be taken into account (FAO 2006). However, these farms rely on grassland production which is very sensitive to weather conditions (Gateau et al. 2006). Currently the EU and France are thinking at introducing a risk management framework into their agricultural policy. Since farmers individual risk-management strategies can supplement or replace public compensation policies and private insurance, they have to be well understood. Farm risk management aims at profitably securing and improving farms potential of profit over time. It encompasses two stages. The first one, prior to the realisation of a random event, deals with the mitigation of future risks of loss. The second stage, subsequent to the realisation of this uncertain event, corresponds to decisions adjustments in order to take advantage or to limit damages caused by the random event. These two stages are interlinked since first stage decisions can reduce for instance farm exposure or increase adjustments capacity.
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- 1.
GAMS development Corporation, 1217 Potomac Street W; Washington, DC 20007, USA. www.gams.com
- 2.
1 CFU is the “standard” voluntary dry matter intake of a reference herbage by a 400 kg-heifer, set to 95 g/kg metabolic LW (INRA 2007)
- 3.
Fill value of feed products is calculated as the ratio between the voluntary dry matter intake of the reference herbage by a 400 kg-heifer, set to 95 g/kg LW0.75 (Jarrige et al. 1989), and the voluntary dry matter intake of the forage considered.
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Mosnier, C., Agabriel, J., Lherm, M., Reynaud, A. (2011). On-Farm Weather Risk Management in Suckler Cow Farms: A Recursive Discrete Stochastic Programming Approach. In: Flichman, G. (eds) Bio-Economic Models applied to Agricultural Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1902-6_8
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