Ideal future dairy farm: a Walloon breeders’ point of view | La ferme laitière idéale du futur : un pointde vue des éleveurs laitiers wallons

This research aims to characterize the dairy breeders regarding their idea of the ideal future farm ensuring them an income, in order to highlight their present situation and the ways to advise them towards their wished dairy model. The 245 answers to a survey of breeders, conducted between November 2014 and February 2015 provided information about, amongst others, their wishes concerning the intensification, the specialization, the technological innovation, the kind of workforce, structure, market and milk production (standard vs. differentiated quality milk). Based on this information, a Multiple Correspondence Analysis allowed to create 4 groups of breeders with a similar view of their ideal farm: global-based intensive (GBIb), local-based extensive (LBEb), intermediate and no-opinion breeders. The relationships between these groups and the other recorded qualitative variables as formation needed, obstacles and advantages of breeders organization, of diversification and so forth w ere studied using Chi Square tests and Correspondence Canonical Analysis. A moderate link was observed between the ideal future farm and the current situation of the respondent. This suggested that not all the breeders were in the production system that they considered as most profitable. As a brake to the transformation and diversification, GBIb tended to be more numerous to speak about the uncertainty of the customer loyalty (p-value = 0.07) and LBEb pointed out the size of the investments (p-value = 0.05). LBEb asked more for administrative (p-value = 0.04) and transformation and diversification formations (p-value = 0.03) while GBIb looked more for finance and management formation (p-value = 0.02). In conclusion, there were different ideal dairy farm models considered by the breeders. Their needs were not similar and indicated which tools must be developed and which domain must be studied to support them.