An empirical method to measure the relative efficiency of irrigation methods in agricultural industry

Mohammad Ebrahim Mohammadpour Zarandi ,Shahram Rostampour,N Heydari

doi:10.5267/j.msl.2011.08.011

Abstract

b Member of Research and Education of Ministry of Agricultural , Tehran, Iran A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T One of the most important issues affecting future world is managing the existing water resources. There is no doubt that global warming has created significant troubles on people's lives and it has caused shortage of water in the world. Therefore, we need to manage the water resources by allocating appropriate methods. In this paper, we use data envelopment analysis to measure the relative efficiency of fourteen different irrigation methods. The proposed model of this paper uses four inputs including cost, risk, maintenance and expertise and two outputs including flexibility and durability of irrigation methods. The preliminary results indicate that two surface irrigation methods, two sprinkler irrigation methods and one subsurface irrigation method are considered efficient. Other irrigation methods are only as much as 50 to 94 percent efficient compared with these five irrigation methods.

Highlights

During the past few years, there has been a tremendous increase on prices of foods in the world
Frija et al (2011) investigated pricing policies and its impact on agricultural inputs demand in Tunisia using data envelopment analysis (DEA). They estimated farmers’ individual irrigation water demand functions employing the information hidden in individual farmers’ technical efficiency. This information is extracted through the development of a new deductive methodology based on inverse data envelopment Analysis (DEA) models
Wang (2010) used DEA techniques to develop farm-level technical efficiency measures and sub-vector efficiencies for irrigation water use based on a sample data of 432 wheat farmers in northwestern China

Summary

Introduction

During the past few years, there has been a tremendous increase on prices of foods in the world. Frija et al (2011) investigated pricing policies and its impact on agricultural inputs demand in Tunisia using data envelopment analysis (DEA) They estimated farmers’ individual irrigation water demand functions employing the information hidden in individual farmers’ technical efficiency. They studied energy use pattern for canola production in Golestan province of Iran and the degrees of technical and scale efficiency of producers were analyzed using a nonparametric DEA method They identified the wasteful uses of energy by inefficient farmers and suggested good savings in energy uses from different inputs. Nassiri and Singh (2009) in an assignment used DEA method for measuring energy use efficiency for paddy crop in India They reported that small farmers had high energy-ratio and low specific energy requirement as compared to larger ones at paddy farms and there was strong correlation between energy-ratio and technical efficiency in both category-wise and zone-wise with correlation coefficient 0.98 and 0.99, respectively.

Data envelopment method

Empirical analysis

Findings

Conclusion