Abstract
<p>Rice production plays a key role for Thailand’s economy and for the food security and cash income of Thai small-scale farmers, especially in the Northeast region where the country’s largest area of rice cultivation is located. To increase rice production, the Thai government has introduced several strategies to support farmers such as new technologies, farm practices, and financial institutions. Achieving these strategies, the responsibility from the government and copperation from farmers are crucial. Specifically, these strategies will be more effective if they coincide with the attitudes of farmers. Accordingly, we aimed to estimate the technical efficiency of rice farms, including pure technical and scale efficiency, and to ultimately understand rice farmers’ attitudes toward farm management by comparing efficient and inefficient farms. Our findings suggested that there was significant requirement to increase technical and scale efficiencies of rice production in the study area. In addition, both efficient and inefficient rice farmers were favorable to farming, open to ideas, and strongly enjoy farm activities, such that they would cooperate with an extension officers when transferring information and/or training programs. Finally, policymaker should focus on both improving the quality of farm production and reducing production costs due to develop and establish new strategies and/or agricultural policies.</p>
Highlights
In Thailand, rice is a major food crop that accounts for 47% of the total 23.8 million hectare for agricultural area
The average family labor utilization for rice production was 14.64 person-days per ha, and 5.68 person-days of hired labor per ha. This result implies that the activities of rice production in this study area were mainly conducted by family labor
The findings of this study reveal that the average scores of technical, pure technical, and scale efficiency were 0.76, 0.82, and 0.92, respectively
Summary
In Thailand, rice is a major food crop that accounts for 47% of the total 23.8 million hectare (ha) for agricultural area. The Thai government has undertaken various strategies to further increase rice production These strategies include introducing modern techniques and technologies, training new farm practices, implementing various farm-related reforms, and establishing local financial institutions. For these strategies to succeed, both the responsibility of the government and agricultural officers and cooperation from farmers are important. The strategies to increase agricultural production will be more successful if they correspond to farmers’ values and attitudes (Palacios, 2005) This is due to farmers’ attitudes being related to many farm decisions, especially gathering information and adopting new technology (Willock et al, 1999)
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