Socio-economic and marketing channels of dairy farms in Western Himalayas of India

Abstract

The socio economic profile of the Dairy farmers in study area revealed that majority (49.20%) of the farmers belongs to small category followed by medium category (33.00%) and large (17.80%) category. The distribution of average family size was highest in case of large farmer category i.e., 6.26 members followed by medium category (6.04) and small category (4.81). The findings in case of gender distribution of the dairy household head (DHH) across the farm categories showed the dominance of male across the different categories. In small categories 89.84 percent, DHH were male whilst 10.16 percent were females. Similar trends were observed in case of medium and large categories i.e., 91.60 percent and 99 percent were males and 8.90 percent and 1 percent were females respectively. The marketed surplus across the dairy farm categories is depicted in the table 1. The perusal of table depicts that in case of overall category, the average daily milk production per household per day was 20.03 liters, which varied from 7.00 liter in small farmers to 50.56 liter in the case of large farmers. It was found that the milk production had a direct relationship with land holding size of sampled households. Present findings are in consonance with the findings of Thakur (2010). The percentage of marketed surplus of milk was observed to be highest in the case of large category farms (85.00%), followed by medium farms (79.09%) and small category farms (74.41%).