Beyond Farm Size: Productivity and Accessibility Are Associated with Economic Performance in Mountain Sheep Farming

Mountain sheep farming contributes to rural livelihoods and the management of mountain grazing landscapes; however, its economic performance may be constrained by low animal productivity, remoteness, labor requirements, and limited market integration. This study investigated farm-level characteristics associated with self-reported annual income per ewe in 37 mountain sheep farms. Using a structured questionnaire, we examined farm structure, flock management, grazing practices, infrastructure, technology, production, marketing, and future development intentions. Annual income per ewe was categorized into four ordered brackets. Because two responses combined income categories and could not be unambiguously assigned, 35 observations were used; therefore, they were used for the principal inferential analyses. Associations were examined using Spearman’s rank correlation and Mann–Whitney U tests with effect sizes. The two primary associations were further evaluated using bootstrap confidence intervals, permutation testing and leave-one-out sensitivity analyses, while a parsimonious ordinal logistic regression was used as a multivariable sensitivity analysis. Annual milk yield per ewe was positively associated with income per ewe (Spearman’s ρ = 0.570; 95% bootstrap CI: 0.282–0.789; permutation p = 0.0006). Off-road access to grazing areas showed a similarly robust positive association (Spearman’s ρ = 0.521; 95% bootstrap CI: 0.270–0.737; permutation p = 0.001). Both variables remained associated with higher income categories in parsimonious ordinal models, whereas herd size and pasture area showed no evidence of association with income per ewe. These findings suggest that economic differentiation in the surveyed mountain sheep farms may be more closely related to animal-level productivity and operational accessibility than to physical farm scale alone. Given the small, cross-sectional sample and the self-reported ordinal outcome, the results should be interpreted as associative and hypothesis-generating rather than causal.