A0216
Title: Copula-based regressions for assessing trade-offs between milk production and greenhouse-gas emissions of French farms
Authors: Naomi Ouachene - Institut Agro - INRAE (France)
Michael Corson - Institut Agro - INRAE (France)
Tristan Senga Kiesse - Institut Agro - INRAE (France) [presenting]
Claudia Czado - Technical University of Munich (Germany)
Abstract: In the context of climate change, livestock systems have several challenges to meet, including improving their environmental performances and ensuring food security. Due to interactions among the many components of farms, strategies to decrease one emission may increase another emission or decrease farm production. Since the effectiveness of combined strategies to mitigate emissions at the farm scale cannot be assessed by considering the effectiveness of one strategy at a time, whole-farm mitigation scenarios are preferred. On this basis, the aim is to assess trade-offs between milk production and emissions when simultaneous changes in management practices are made. To this end, copula-based regressions are investigated to explain farm outputs, considering the multivariate dependence structure among their descriptive components. The method was applied to a dataset of management practices, production and emissions of 2523 French dairy farms surveyed in 2013. Copula-based regressions are first fitted to milk production per cow and total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per livestock unit separately, and then conditional dependence is assumed between them. Subsequently, we explored whole-farm mitigation scenarios to decrease GHG emissions while maintaining milk production. The utility of capturing interactions among practices and outputs of farms is then assessed in order to develop effective mitigation scenarios.
