Livestock Farming Systems and Cattle Production Orientation

This study was an attempt to devise productive orientationsof cattle herds in eastern high plains of algeria. in thisregard, 165 farms randomly identified were investigated. theselection of breeders was based to existence of cattle on thefarm, and the farmer proposed to investigation must have atleast two cows. the approach taken was to identify all systemsadopted by farmers in a region through the analysis of the relationshipbetween the maintenance of different types of cattleand preferred marketing policies. the model has been emergedas a result of functional typology established using the procedurecategorical principal components analysis (catpca) of optimalcoding in spss [19. 2010]. following this approach, fivetypes of cattle productive orientation have been identified, thebalanced mixed system (dairy-beef), beef mixed system, dairymixed system, dairy system and beef system. these resultsshowed that the breeders were oriented towards specialization(dairy or beef) in less than 20% of situations. farmers in ourcontext prefer mixed systems when beef mixed system wasthe model type frequently encountered in the region (over than50% of farms).