Financial source of dairy farms: A case of Burdur province

The aims of this study, was to identify the financial source of dairy farms in particular in the Burdur province and to determine the relationship between the special characteristics of dairy farm enterprises with their financial sources. Primary data was employed in this study and the data was obtained by face to face interview with the help of well-designed questionnaire. The data was gathered from 105 farm enterprises using Neyman stratified sampling methods. After using Neyman stratified sampling methods to get the sampling number the farmers was selected randomly. The 2012 production season data was collected.The farmers who used credit from the formal credit institution as their financial source were 57%, 17% used non-formal institutional credit and 26% as self-financing. There were not statistical differences between financing groups of farm enterprises and farmer's age, education level, experience, farm's profitability, costs, number of cows, animal existence (unit of cattle). In contrast, there were statistical differences between financing group of farm enterprises and applied techniques in livestock, cooperatives, support used from government, continuation of dairy farm, farm land size. Self-financing group has the highest use of roughage feedstuff. Formal and non-formal credit institution groups belonged to cooperative in terms of more years. Also feedstuff support, milk support and animal heads supports were more given attention by the government in the farmers gets more benefit from them. Formal and non-formal credit institution groups have the highest farm land size. On the other hand, formal and self-financing credit groups have tendency of continuation of dairy farm.Producing value-added production structure in which the agricultural sector can be developed using different financing instruments should be giving the needed attention to boost the production.