Feedstuff farm selection

Alfalfa, maize silage, maize corn, barley and oilseed meal are the feedstuffs for Iranian cattle farming. In the Azarbaijan provinces (West Azarbaijan, East Azarbaijan and Ardabil), the main regions for alfalfa production are Moghan plain, Miandoab, and Naghade. Maize silage and corn are produced in the Moghan plain (Ardabil province) and the Kermanshah and Khuzestan provinces. Barley is mainly imported from Ukraine and Canada, but it is produced inside the country in a few regions as well as the Moghan plain. Cotton and sunflower cake are mainly imported from central Asia. Soya and rapeseed cake are produced in the Ker-manshah and Gorgan provinces.

The energy efficiency of these feedstuffs should theoretically be investigated within their orig-inal production regions. Therefore, in the absence of any similar or related studies involving energy efficiency, the production input and output data should be collected from the farms that produce at least the majority of feedstuffs used in the selected cattle farms. In this study, the region that produces most of these feedstuffs was chosen. Therefore, the Moghan

agro-industrial company in the Moghan plain was chosen for investigating the energy efficiency of feedstuff production.

There is a large area under cultivation by the Moghan agro-industrial company, which pro-duces diverse products with mechanised farming systems. The 40-year-old company has experience in applying new technologies related to mechanised farming, and it has intro-duced new or unconventional products to the region, making it a pioneer in the field. The company was established by the government in 1971 with more than 63,000 hectares of un-cultivated Moghan plain land (Anonymous, 2013). It has since become one of the largest agricultural companies in Iran. This company produces a wide range of agricultural and horti-cultural products, which are sold directly to the markets and processed in their own food firms inside the company or are consumed as feedstuff in the cattle farm unit, which has re-cently grown to almost 15,000 cattle.

Following the patterns used by the Moghan Company and adopted by other private compa-nies and farmers in Moghan, which have relatively larger farm sizes in comparison to farms in other regions, these methods have led this plain to become a major supplier of agricultural products.

The Moghan plain is located in north-western Iran and west of the Caspian Sea, between a latitude of 39° N and 40° N and a longitude of 42° E and 48° E, with an average altitude of 45 m over sea level (Anonymous, 2013). The annual rainfall is 265 mm, the average minimum temperature is 9.7°C, the average maximum temperature is 20.5°C, and the average annual temperature is 15.1°C (Tavousi & Delara, 2011). As a result of the high soil fertility, the high average temperature and available water resources from dams and irrigation networks from the Aras river, this plain contributes a high share of food production and feed delivery to dairy cattle farms in neighbouring provinces.

3.3.4.1 Feedstuff data acquisition

The necessary production input and output data were collected by making field observations and measurements or technical calculations from the Moghan Company farms. The study feedstuffs from the Moghan Company were alfalfa (1,200 ha), barley (2,000 ha), maize corn (3,000 ha), maize silage (1,000 ha spring maize silage and 2,000 ha summer maize silage), rapeseed (3,000 ha) and wheat (7,000 ha). Selected products or by-products were used di-rectly or indidi-rectly as cattle feedstuff. The farms were segmented into several ten-hectare farms and cultivated in yearly crop rotation. Propitious agricultural conditions and water availability during the long farming season make it possible to cultivate as many as two crops each year. The cultivation of maize forage as a secondary product following the harvest of cereals or oilseeds as a primary product is very common. With nearly the same water

deliv-ery and climate conditions during different years as well as stable operational procedures, no significant differences were observed in the production input and output data for the compa-ny. Therefore, the average value for 3 years, ending in the year 2010 (the year 1389 in the Iranian calendar), was calculated.

Energy efficiency indicators for feedstuffs (e.g., cottonseed and soya bean) not investigated here were derived from the scientific literature using studies with similar regional conditions.

All cultivation machinery operations and materials applied and consumed during production were included in the data acquisition. These data consisted of the production yield, con-sumed material (seed, manure, fertiliser, pesticide and water), fuel consumption, duration and repetition of machinery operations, and type and weight of machinery. Machinery opera-tions such as sub-soiling or manure spreading are repeated every 5 years and were distrib-uted equally over 5 years, although their effect is not the same for the years covered in this study.

3.3.4.2 Dairy farms selection

Dairy farms were selected in view of the differences in dairy cattle numbers per farm, milk yield, region, and year. The number of dairy cattle in the selected farms should reflect the herd size distribution in Iran as described in section 2.1 (85% of dairy cattle are kept in herds with less than 51 heads, 5% in herds between 51 and 100 heads and 10% in herds with more than 100 heads). The dairy farms were selected from three provinces (West and East Azarbaijan and Zanjan), which are representative of prevailing dairy farming methods in north-western Iran. These provinces were selected according to the dairy distribution in 5 regions. Cattle in these regions are cross breeds of Holstein and a local breed, with different degrees of breed purity. Data were gathered for 2008, 2009 and 2010.

On the one hand, there was an intention to gather data from a high number of farms to ena-ble representative results with a high degree of accuracy. On the other hand, the required data could not be obtained from some of the selected dairies. These dairies were especially large farms with several hundred cattle. Therefore, only two dairies with more than 100 heads of dairy cattle could provide the requested information. Lastly, the required data were obtained from 24 dairies in 4 regions. Fifteen dairies were in East Azarbaijan (3 in region 1 and 12 in region 2), 8 dairies were in West Azarbaijan (region 3), and only one dairy was located in Zanjan (region 4).

3.3.4.3 Dairy farm data acquisition

The desired data were obtained from the dairies by using a questionnaire designed for this purpose. The questions were arranged in 5 groups. The first group was about the number and mass of different cattle categories (calves, bulls, heifers and cows) at the beginning and end of each year and the number of cattle sold or bought in that year along with the selling time. The second group included questions about the amounts and types of annual feedstuff consumption for the dairy and the daily feed intake of the cattle categories. The building area specifications for materials and roofed and non-roofed areas and the specifications for ma-chinery used in the dairies, i.e., their nominal power, mass and usage hours, made up the third group of questions. Direct energy resource consumption was obtained by the forth questions group. The last questions were about the annual milk production of the dairy farms, the amount of manure produced, the average daily milk yield, dairy cattle replacement rate, calving interval, etc. Due to the lack of regular measurements for some data, such as cattle body mass and the amount of feedstuffs remaining in the dairies from year to year, farmer estimations were used.