Profiling Goat Farm Enterprises Under the Prism of Sustainability: The Role of Financial Ratios, Socio-Demographic Characteristics and the Waste Management in Goat Enterprises

Abstract

Sustainable livestock farming is a hot issue worldwide. Last decade there is an intense transformation that affect all aspects of the sector like economic, social and environmental. This transformation has to deal with the increasing market globalization, the changes in Common Agriculture Policy and the new social awareness in environmental issues. The aim of this study is to profile and classify goat farms according to their performance using farm-level data that concerns economic, social and environmental sustainability. A combination of multivariate analysis techniques, such as Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis were developed for the aggregation of synthetic indicators and for the creation of farm typologies. According to results, Greek goat farming achieves a low performance in almost all pillars of sustainability, but if the sector adopt sustainable practices there is the margin to become more elastic and competitive.