Main Contributor: Wolfgang Britz

The stocking densities are estimated for the animal production activities found in the CAPRI data base

• Dairy cows
• Suckler cows
• Male calves under 1 year for breeding
• Female calves under 1 year for breeding
• Male calves under 1 year for fattening
• Female calves under 1 year for fattening
• Heifers for breeding
• Heifers for fattening
• Bulls for fattening
• Sows
• Pigs for fattening
• Laying hens
• Poultry fattening
• Sheep and goat for milk
• Other sheep and goat

Attention: CAPRI uses a flow concept to define the activity levels for animal production processes. For fattening activities, the activity level is defined as the number of slaughtered animals. For raising activities, the activity level is equal to the number of raised animals. These activity levels are not equal to average annual herd sizes, but can be converted by taking into account the number of production cycles per year.

The fattening and raising processes are defined per slaughtered or raised animal, and not per number of animals present at a certain point in time. For the maps, the data for the animal activities are firstly converted to livestock units, and then aggregated to ruminants (cattle, sheep and goat), non-ruminants (pigs, poultry) and total animals, measured in livestock units.

The estimation process is based on regressions of data from the Farm Structure Survey 1999 plus climate, soil, slope and altitude data. Those regressions models are used to define a forecast and its error per HSMU which serves as the a priori density entering a Highest Posterior Density estimator. The latter choses the stocking density per cluster of 1×1 km pixel cells which comes closed to the a priori forecast under the condition that the regional numbers reported in FSS are recovered.

Britz W.:
Pan-European Estimation of animal stocking densities 1x1 km grid, JRC, 2007 (pdf, foils)

Last Updated:Tuesday, October 28, 2008