Implications of adoption of Conservation Tillage (CT) on Productive Efficiency: A Syrian case

Abstract

This study assessed the implications of adoption of CT technology on productive efficiency of 820 farmers in Syria. Survey data was collected for a sample of 500 randomly selected farmers and 320 elite farmers who were purposively selected to participate in the conservation tillage project. Both nonparametric parametric (i.e., output oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA)) and parametric (i.e., efficiency effects stochastic frontier analysis (SFA)) approaches were used to estimate technical efficiencies for each of the sampled farms and check for the robustness of results. Regression analysis was used to investigate the determinants of technical efficiencies estimated using the DEA approach. Results of the DEA model indicate that the mean technical efficiency of farmers who applied CT technology is higher relative to that of farmers who applied CC technology under constant and variable returns to scale (CRS and VRS) assumptions. Mean technical efficiencies obtained with the SFA lend support to those results by finding the mean technical efficiency is higher for CT technology relative to CC technology. A strong rank correlation was found between the results obtained from the output-oriented VRS-DEA and SFA models. Analysis of determinants of technical efficiency indicates that education and experience of farm operators, early planting and use of improved varieties would reduce productive inefficiency while soil salinity would increase inefficiency. The implication of our results is that farmers using CC technology can increase their productive efficiency by adopting CT technology.