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Frequently acknowledged as coming forward to environmental issues by reducing external input use, low input (LI) dairy farming is gaining attention. The absence of a clearly delineated description of LI dairying, however, hampers identification and analysis of these farming systems. This paper aims at empirically examining, EU wide, the farm structure, production intensity and productivity of LI with respect to their high input (HI) conventional counterpart and to organic dairying (ORG). A pragmatic quartiles-based categorization of farms from the Farm Accountancy Data Network of 20 important EU dairy countries, with the value of external input costs per grazing livestock unit (GLU) is used as prior discriminating indicator between LI and HI. LI dairy farms are smaller than HI dairy farms, in particular when farm size is expressed as total farm capital. Other variables that differentiate between LI and HI in most countries are number of dairy cows per GLU and area of forage and grassland on total agricultural area. Partial productivities in HI farms exceed those in LI farms, most apparent is milk production per cow. Differentiation of forage production between LI and HI is less uniform throughout Europe. A pairwise matching of differentiation profiles between countries indicates that differentiation between LI and HI is country specific. A similar diversity in country-specific differentiation between ORG and LI farming is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livestock farming is central to global food security and to the sustainability of rural communities throughout Europe. Animal health management has a major impact on farming efficiency. Although animal health research has provided effective prevention strategies for the major endemic diseases of livestock, these strategies typically provide solutions for single infectious diseases and they are often not adequately implemented due to farm-specific constraints. We propose a concept termed "ECONOHEALTH" which aims at including the economic and social context in our understanding of the factors that drive animal health. The concept is elaborated on using the example of the major helminthic diseases of cattle in temperate climate regions (gastrointestinal nematodes, liver fluke and lungworm). By considering major diseases simultaneously and placing disease-complexes in an economic and a social context, we believe that insights will be generated upon which more integrated, situation-adapted and thus more effective prevention strategies can be devised., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)