0
The Danish agricultural production is constantly getting better at utilising the resources for the production of meat, milk and cereals. This is what new figures from DCA – Danish Centre for Food and Agriculture show us. The results are based on a new method to quantify the development of production and resource efficiency using publicly available data.
The results show that for the use of resources are moving in the right direction. Grain yield measured in net energy per hectare has been fairly constant over the period, but there has been a tendency for the production of protein per m2 to decline.
The production of meat per sow has increased by 35 percent from 1990 to 2012. At the same time feed consumption in pig production has decreased by six percent and consumption of protein has fallen by 22 percent over the same period. A combination of a more efficient utilisation of feed and increased yield per unit area used for protein crops means that the area used to produce one kilo of pork has fallen from 6.8 m2 in 1990 to 5.6 m2 in 2012.
Milk production shows the same tendency of a more efficient use of resources. Milk production per cow-year has risen 40 percent from 1990 to 2012. If you factor in meat production, which has not changed, to the concept of animal yield, production has increased from 8525 kg per cow-year in 1990 to 10.694 kg in 2012. Where in 1990 the size of the area of used to produce one kg of animal product from dairy farming was 1.23 m2, by 2012 this had been reduced to only 1.08 m2.
Tuesday February 24, 2015/ DCA/ Denmark.
http://dca.au.dk
