An integrated view of technical, economic and social factors influencing sustainability of sixteen local European cattle breeds

This study aims to identify common patterns influencing dynamics and sustainability of 16 local European cattle breeds from Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Holland, Ireland, Italy and Spain. A broad range of factors related to technical (e.g. farm size, cows/ha, land ownership), economic (e.g. cattle importance on farm and family income, type of market) and social (e.g. farmers and stakeholders attitude) aspects were surveyed on a total of 401 farms. Discriminant Analysis has been used to study the implications that heterogeneity within and across countries and breeds may have in making inferences in across country or breed analyses. Thus, farms were classified according to country and breeds. Then the objective was to evaluate how all factors available allow us to distinguish such classes. The analyses provided the percentage of observations (farms) that should not be included in the pre-defined groups (country and breed) according to the variables considered. When only economic variables were considered in the analyses, 36% and 59% of farms were incorrectly assigned to their country and breed, respectively. However, considering technical variables the proportions went down to 33% and 45%. Finally, when both groups of variables were considered 20% and 35% of farms were incorrectly assigned. To what extent these mismatches may allow us to identify general patterns has to be evaluated.