Abstract
Family farm emerged as a new form of agricultural production organization in China in recent years. For the purpose of sustainable development, decision-makers, such as farm owners and policy makers, require the precise information of a family farm’s state of operation to adopt measures for management improvement and agricultural contamination reduction. Considering this, we established two evaluation systems for the measurement of family farms’ management and environmental performance. As demonstrated in several recent studies, data envelopment analysis (DEA) cross efficiency is a useful approach for evaluating and comparing the performance of decision-making units (DMUs). Regarding family farms’ performance evaluation issues, we modified the traditional average cross-efficiency method to be the ultimate comprehensive cross-efficiency approach with the integration of two statistical quantities based on the full consideration of family farms’ unique features, such as vulnerability and seasonality, resulting from the influence of natural and social factors. Our proposed approach presents more excellent characteristics compared with CCR efficiency and average cross efficiency. Several conclusions regarding the operation of China’s family farms are drawn: (i) there is weak positive correlation between family farms’ management and environmental performance; (ii) there is an increasing trend for both management and environmental efficiency, along with the augmentation of the utilized agricultural area of family farms, and management performance is therefore more significant; (iii) demand for timely technological instruction to improve family farms’ management efficiency is expressed by farm owners who are willing to expand; (iv) to improve family farms’ environmental performance, several measures—such as introducing biotechnology, providing subsidies, and environmental education for farmers—should be adopted.
Highlights
As one of the largest developing countries in the world, China has realized a dramatic increase in crop production during the past few decades, as well as economic and social improvement in rural areas [1]
At the beginning of 2013, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee proposed the development of the ‘family farm’ as a new type of agricultural organization to adapt to the current agricultural development period and facilitate agricultural production [2]
This study creatively proposes the ultimate comprehensive cross-efficiency evaluation approach (UCCE) with better discriminating ability, which is integrated with two statistical concepts, the Mahalanobis distance and the variation coefficient, such that the numerical characteristics for each criterion can be taken into account and the reliable evaluation results can be produced
Summary
As one of the largest developing countries in the world, China has realized a dramatic increase in crop production during the past few decades, as well as economic and social improvement in rural areas [1]. Farms rely on family members as the main labor force and engage in the scale, intensive, commercialized production and management of agriculture, and use agricultural income as the main household income (Communist Party of China Document No., the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China& State council of China, December 2012). Farms are an important modern agricultural microeconomic organization that can liberate labor forces and promote modern agriculture processes [3,4]. Family farming plays a critical role in global food production [5]. The production of family farms cannot only provide sufficient food for the public, and bring considerable income for the household. It is important to measure family farms’ production activity performance to distinguish good and bad practices and provide information to decision-makers (e.g., farm owners, policy makers, etc.) who aim to improve operations
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