Milk production in Brazil is heading toward production systems with livestock of increased productivity. The most frequent system is the total confinement, followed by the semi-confinement. The objective of this study was to estimate some economic indicators of dairy farms with high daily production volumes, under a semi-confinement and total confinement system, located in the state of Minas Gerais. The data used was collected between the months of March, 2008 and February, 2009, in six milk production systems, three being under semi-confinement and three under total confinement. The total and operational cost methodology was used for the production cost in the profitability analysis. In the economic analysis, for having shown positive results, the production systems in semi-confinement had economic viability and conditions of producing in the short, medium and long term, with consequent capitalization of farmers; while the total confinement production systems showed negative gross margin, which indicates that farmers are losing money and accumulating debt, because the revenues were not sufficient even to pay the effective operating expenses.
return analysis; dairy cattle; production cost
