Abstract
Recreational functions are among the most important practices to improve farmers’ income and to promote sustainability in the rural territories. Two crucial issues are the ability to rationally allocate farm resources and the ability to efficiently produce different sorts of food and non-food goods. Possible cost savings due to the co-presence of different activities can generate positive effects in the creation of value by agritourist farmers. This paper aims to investigate technical efficiency related to agritourism and recreational functions in Sardinia. Based on a sample of 37 farms and using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach, we aim to estimate the technical efficiency of double attitude processes, such as those that characterise agritourism practices. Our findings suggest that efficiency can improve if technical inputs are adequately used; however, the scale appears to be close enough to optimal. Furthermore, we estimated that the margins for improving the efficiency are larger for recreational services and that technical factors contribute to efficiency with a different magnitude. Furthermore, we estimated whether agricultural and non-agricultural resources are efficiently allocated. To our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts in Europe at using an efficiency analysis in agritourism.
Highlights
Today, farmers operate in increasingly complex scenarios, which causes difficulties, especially for small- and mid-scale farms, worldwide
The results indicate that the average Technical efficiency (TE) values for the constant return to scale (CRS) and variable return to scale (VRS) frontiers are 0.726 and 0.789, respectively (Table 2)
Considering the latter measure, which represents the so-called “pure efficiency”, the results suggest that agritourist farmers would have been able to increase their output by 20.1% by using their disposable resources more efficiently
Summary
Farmers operate in increasingly complex scenarios, which causes difficulties, especially for small- and mid-scale farms, worldwide. Agricultural income is highly unstable, and farming is a hazardous business due to sudden changes in both yields and prices that are not completely manageable over time [6] and which are driven by production, price, and technological and policy uncertainties [7]. To tackle these disadvantages and try to increase (or stabilise) their incomes, small farmers have activated a wide range of strategic adjustments [8,9,10,11]. Diversification might include introducing new and alternative crops, often combined with marketing strategies focused on niche markets and direct marketing (agricultural diversification), re-locating farm resources to off-farm activities (income diversification), and starting and enhancing new on-farm activities (structural diversification) [12,13,14,15]
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