Using:
-Average cost of production throughtout year.
-Average market price of milk.
-Per animal milk production and number of milking animals.
-Number of labour on farm.
I do not get your point indeed. But such a study it is very important to determine the concept of family income. The second point is whether you intent to determine income from milk production entenprise or whole farm. It is also important that farm family income includes in some cases income from agricultural activities out of the farm.
You can do it if you can estimate the milk price of producer (or farm gate price) using the market price (wholesale price? or other kind of price?). In other words, you need to know the average difference between these prices - for milk, for this specific region, and for different months of the year. And also for the quality of milk for the farms you study.
I think it can be done the most commonly used methods for handling missing data is Multiple Imputation method whre in you arrive at an estimate using the data sets available with you. Another method is Maximum likelihood estimation which is more error free.
These provisions are provided with SPSS as well as SAS I think
Is it missing data?? I think missing data technique is different.....In social sciences researches we used to deal with people/ farming community, where we collect data on numbers of parameters. For e.g. Household/ individual Income, generally nobody will tell you directly his/ her income. Actully it is tactics in survey research to elicit the response on main vairabl;es by asking related questions like....sources of income..farm and or non-farm..... and different ways as mentioned by you to calculate individual farmer income from dairy farming.
The farmer could bring you information like the quantity of milking cows in the period and aproximately how much milk per cow was the production in the period, plus the price information; it will be easy to estimate the missing data.
I would just be careful about the definition of the income variable. Do farmers in this region consider items such as depreciation and interest repayments in reporting their farm incomes? The sale and purchase of livestock may or may not be important here. Also, some definitions of farm income account for changes in the value of the livestock during the accounting period. You may end up computing something which is closer to a cash flow indicator than an income indicator.
Farmers who reported their income, they reported the market value of milk minus the expenses...they perceived the monthly income as left over amount after paying back the bills for feed, utility and other expenses.
Muhammad, without knowing the particulars, I would look at the following:
1. How many months of missing data do you have per farmer?
2. Are there any particular months that are more prevalent (say rainy season months where price is lower but production is higher).
3. If you are trying to determine income flow for a group of farmers with the same or similar technology, similar genetics, feed availability, etc. you probably do not need a very large data set and rather need to focus on a relatively small sample for which you have the complete data.
4. Unless prices and production per cow remain stable during the year (not the case in most of Latin America) the way you are proposing to fill in the missing data is not something I would do. However, from your question I am not understanding what you have on a monthly basis and what you have on a yearly basis.... it seem you have milk production per cow but, is it on a yearly basis or on a monthly basis, also prices are there average monthly or yearly prices... If they are on a monthly basis, then your calculation would be pretty accurate
Though I not clear well with your question; I can state what I perceive.
1. If you compute net monthly income of the dairy farmers having missing in it then values that you are getting is incorrect because average monthly net income (after farmers deducted expenses and other explicit and implicit costs from the gross sale gain) differs from household to household depending family size, consumption rate or trend, labor etc expenses so having the missing of an extended family may affect the projection of income. Then the best way is to trap the missing and ask the household going back again.
2, If your data has some kind of trend then you can predict the missing values so that you can forecast missing.
This is possible and only reasonable if the proportion of missing data to the total sample size is small and farmers can be grouped into smaller locality with similar trends in prices, production systems etc.
secondly, approximate the quantity of milk production with the variables you have would be easier, but other incomes from sale of livestock, manure etc would be very difficult.
Lastly, estimation of milk production per cow from a survey is not as accurate as picking the actual production from records and so even if you had all the data from the survey, it still remains estimation.
I have read all the answers above, thank you all for your responses.
Let me make it clearer, the average market price for milk does not fluctuate much because of the contract they bind with the middleman... what fluctuate is the cost of production, it is mainly influenced by the feed prices... labour, utility bills and veterinary expenses are also somehow precalculated. so the major fluctuation is because of milk production and feed costs...
In this scenario what do you all suggest to estimate the income? or should I consider the average market value of produced milk to serve the purpose of income variable?
This is a matter of variable construction.The best possible definite variable must be Sources of income (If you say market price which do not fluctuate much) minus all expenditures.You can define it as the net income.And you can work out the relation or influence of all other variables... feed cost, labor.... on the NET INCOME
As a scientists from developing countries, would you please do not believe this tricky software etc.? Would you please try to reach real data, not missing ones? I am certainly sure that you know real problem of your dairy sector. Then please focus on them.
Take care
I am certainly sure that, your farmer have marketing problem along with some facility deficiencies. If private sector has processing plants in that region, there is bargaining problem between farmers and the industry. You can search USA and EU dairy sector. Even their farmers have same problem. Take care.
Professor... Linkages especially structural are non existent between sectors everywhere.In many countries the milk marketing and processing is done by Producers cooperatives owned by the public sector.they are called in different names like milk producers and marketing federations, cooperatives and so on. They offer protection to the producers in realising minimmum prices as well as timely distribution among huge population.
In case it is purely a dairy farmers, then you may take cost and revenue parameters and hence work out income. If he is having some land as well, growing fodder on it, then cost of fodder or feed produced on the farm should be valuated at market price to know the income from dairy enterprise only.
If you want to learn to estimate real income of dairy farmers I can explain in detail.
I am still waiting your mail to [email protected].
Answer your request is ready
Take care
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