Robotic milking systems in dairy farming: A frontier eco-efficiency approach

Abstract

Although agriculture remains an important tale in rural areas from a land use perspective, there is a change in the concentration and intensification of agricultural activities that causes considerable environmental problems and undermines the transition to sustainable rural development. To overcome this challenge, international organizations and policy makers advocate that the adoption of digital technologies enables farmers to simultaneously enhance productivity and environmental management, but there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. This article aims to assess the impact of robotic milking systems on eco-efficiency in dairy farming systems in Luxembourg drawing on the life cycle assessment approach, farm accountancy data, machine learning-based inverse propensity weighting technique, and stochastic frontier analysis. In divergence with previous findings from the adoption literature, insights from model-agnostic methods indicate that proxies for farmers’ degree of mechanization tend to play a key role in the adoption process. Although the main findings hint at the positive relationship between digital technology adoption and eco-efficiency, there are large discrepancies in sustainable performance within dairy farming systems. Moreover, direct payments, subsidies related to agri-environmental commitments and the education of farm manager tend to be key drivers of eco-efficiency. The implications of these findings are discussed within the literature on sustainable rural development.