Are there trade-offs between animal welfare and egg-producing farm efficiency?

Abstract

Agribusiness is currently faced with the challenge of providing sufficient quality food for a growing population with limited natural resources. Egg production, as an important source of nutrition, is a dynamically developing sector of livestock production on a global scale. Simultaneously, the increasing public and legal considerations of animal welfare affect egg-producing operations. This paper aims to provide insight into missing evidence in the trade-offs between animal welfare and efficiency in egg-producing farms in the Czech Republic and the European Union. Detailed data were gathered on the extent of the enriched cage and indoor cage-free housing systems (aviaries/barns) among the main 30 Czech table-egg-producers. Original micro data enlarged the information on table-egg producers collected using the Orbis database. For the efficiency analysis at the EU level, data on the housing systems were obtained from Eurostat and combined with aggregated data from the Orbis database. A robust data envelopment analysis was applied which benefits from including animal-welfare variables directly into the efficiency evaluation. The results showed a negative, but statistically insignificant, relationship between the animal welfare and efficiency of the egg producers for the Czech Republic table-egg producers as well as those on the EU-country level.