at a time. Altogether we interviewed sixteen farmers in
eight operations in two different regions. The interviews
lasted from one to two hours and we emphasised factors
that promote or hamper collaboration in the farmer
team. Each joint operation has typically three or four
active farmers. We are now analysing the interviews and
the production data and plan to include more economic
data. As an early analysis, we classified the quality of the
teamwork as good, medium or poor. Similarly, experts
in the different fields assessed how well the operations
performed with respect to milk quality, animal health
and herd fertility.
Preliminary analyses indicate a relationship between
milk quota filling and quality of teamwork. Teams with
good teamwork manage in general to deliver a higher
percentage of their milk quota to the dairy than teams
with poor quality teamwork. There is also a tendency
that poor teamwork influences cattle health negatively
compared to good teamwork. The rich context in a
semi- structured interview setting allowed us to get a
deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
One of the interviewed farmers with low quota filling
told us in detail about the collaboration problems:
“Well … you know… since the relations between us has
become the way they are [bad]…, it has become a big
problem to get the daily work done. We have to rely on
occasional labour, and the first thing that suffers then is
the production.”
It turned out that bad working climate had reduced
the partners’ involvement and willingness to work in the
joint operation. This lead to lack of qualified labour, and
therefore, they had to rely on occasional labour of varying
quality. Quality of teamwork is not registered in cattle-
databases. If we had only assessed the production
figures and not visited the farm, we would not have
fully understood the reasons behind the low quota filling.
Neither would we have been in a position to assess
what kind of help to offer them. After the interview we
were convinced that unless the partners could improve
their collaboration, it would be of limited use to offer
them extensive services on e.g. preventive health care.
The farmers simply needed help to collaborate. This
case illustrates the importance of understanding the
social context in which the farmers operate. Clearly,
without the particular contextual knowledge we could
easily make a wrong conclusion in this particular case.
Furthermore, we also conducted in-depth analyses by
contrasting different cases. For example, we found the
herd fertility on one farm to be extremely good, and the
fertility on another farm to be extremely low. Both
cases had very low teamwork quality, so teamwork quality
cannot explain the difference in fertility between
them. However, in-depth analysis of the two cases
revealed one important distinction. The manager on the