Resource Efficiency Estimation and Digital Recommendation: Sustainable Pathway to Improve Paddy Farmers' Productivity

Piyush Kumar Singh, Shiladitya Dey and Anirban Pal

No 334522, 97th Annual Conference, March 27-29, 2023, Warwick University, Coventry, UK from Agricultural Economics Society - AES

Abstract: The study assesses the resource use efficiency of smallholder paddy farmers with/without considering undesirable outputs through the mobile-based application. Further, the study performs an impact assessment of digital recommendations on farmers' paddy yield improvement. A mobile app-based questionnaire was used to collect data from 153 paddy farmers in eastern India. The study employed Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify the farmers' resource use efficiency with/without undesirable output. We found lower farm eco-efficiency scores with undesirable output in the model compared to the case of not considering the undesirable output analysis. Results also showed that farmers are over-utilizing fertilizers, farming machinery, and labor in farming, which needs to be reduced to the recommended optimal level. Finally, using the Propensity Score Matching (PSM), we observed that the farmers achieved better paddy yield, i.e., an additional 0.6t/ha paddy, due to the adaptation of mobile-based recommendations. Subsequently, we used probit modeling to estimate the critical factors for adopting mobile-based services. Results show that farmers’ education level, farm experience, social capital, and market information play a significant role in mobile-app-based recommendation adoption. This study supports that farmers need to be suggested to use digital advisory services, and state/central policies may be aligned towards strengthening farmers' capacities for applying digital services in the farming system.

Keywords: Resource/Energy Economics and Policy; Environmental Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/334522/files/A ... ciencyEstimation.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aesc23:334522

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.334522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 97th Annual Conference, March 27-29, 2023, Warwick University, Coventry, UK from Agricultural Economics Society - AES Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().