Time series analysis of cow milk production at Andassa dairy farm, West Gojam Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

Abstract

Milk production is an integral part of Andassa agricultural farming system, even though the area has potential for milk and dairy products, there is always a great demand for milk and milk products among people. However there are no long-term researches done on the area for forecasting the volume of milk production. Therefore this study was attempted to investigate the trends of actual yield of cow milk production and forecast the volume of milk. A time series study was conducted on the volume of cow’s milk production in Andassa dairy farm, and here we used secondary data for this study. The study employed inferential statistics for the purpose of hypothesis testing, estimating the trend, to fit the appropriate model and forecasting. A total of 179 days of milk production were included in this study, and the results showed that the trend of milk yield of caws is decreasing and it is time dependent. The model that has been selected for forecasting volume of milk production is ARIMA (1, 2, 1) since the model was found to be a better model.