How to assess efficiency in animal production : different approaches from animal to farming systems

Efficiency in livestock production is a measure of the extent to which resources are well used for producing animal products. Increasing the efficiency of livestock system is important to improve sustainability of animal production. It is an interesting way to decrease the competition between feed and food, to decrease environmental impacts and to increase competitiveness of animal products. However, if the concept is simple, it is difficult to use it in practice for animal production because several products are often dependent and several resources or impacts are concerned. Between the risks of wrong decision using too simple ratio and the impossibility to decide due to the complexity of multicriteria indicators, is there a possible way for efficiency indicators? This report presents methods and criteria are proposed to assess the efficiency considering the complexity of livestock farming system. The use of residuals of models or the methods of frontier analysis give new perspective to assess efficiency. With animal and farm scale examples, the advantages and limitations of the different approaches are discussed. At animal scale, the question of feed efficiency is addressed. The case of dairy cows is probably one of the most difficult due to the interactions between milk production, meat production, and diversity of diet. At farm scale, the difficulty to combine production and environmental impacts with the diversity of farming systems is also discussed. The Life cycle assessment is more and more recommended to assess environmental impacts of products, but it is often difficult to interpret its multiple indicators. The use of the whole farm as a functional unit, without any specific allocation of resources or impacts to each product, combined with data envelopment analysis is an interesting option to better consider the possible interactions within the farming system. The difficulty to find driving forces explaining the variations of the efficiency indicator through a large diversity of farms is also a challenge illustrated with an example with French dairy farms. If promising tools to assess efficiency are available, the questions of the definition of goals and of the access to the data required to use these tools is probably the next limiting step