INFLUENCE OF THE MODULAR APPROACH ON THE PRODUCTION COSTS DURING INTRODUCTION OF EWES MACHINE MILKING

E. Raycheva, H. Sabkov, T. Ivanova, E. Vidinova

Abstract: The object of this study is the status of sheep breeding in the Republic of Bulgaria and the possibility of reducing the production costs in the sub-sector by application of the modular approach. The analysis of the status and trends in sheep breeding showed that despite the favourable geographical location, climate conditions, rich sheep breeding traditions and wide variety of local indigenous breeds, the sheep population has been reduced about 6-times over the last 20 years, with entire breeds being in danger of extinction. The sheep breeding sub-sector is characterised by low technical and technological level, hand milking of the sheep and shortage of investments. As a rational option to ease the investment process and to reduce the production costs it is proposed the application of modular approach to introduce machine milking in expanding sheep farms with shortage of investment capital. It was found that when the necessary investments for machine milking introduction are covered by a bank loan, the total amount of investment of the modular approach is lower than that of the traditional approach, respectively with: 15.64% for initial sheep farm with 80 ewes and 19.12% for initial sheep farm with 40 ewes. The application of modular approach also contributes to a significant decrease in the depreciation allowances, both in absolute terms and in relative value per production unit. For the conditions of the conducted study it was found that the modular approach contributes to savings from depreciation allowances in size of, respectively, BGN 7515 for initial sheep farm with 80 ewes and BGN 7432 for initial sheep farm with 40 ewes. The survey results suggest that the application of the modular approach contributes to a decrease of the production costs, and therefore can be regarded as a significant factor for the increasing of sheep farms capacity and the development of dairy sheep breeding.

Keywords: machine milking; milking; modular approach; sheep breeding

Date published: 2017-08-28