Estimation of Profit Efficiency and Its Effective Factors for Rainfed Wheat Crop in Ahar County of Iran

The limited resources of production make the need to address the productivity and efficiency of agricultural units including wheat fields more and more apparent. Considering that Ahar County accounts for ten percent of the rainfed wheat cultivation area in East Azerbaijan province of Iran, the present study was conducted to investigate the profit efficiency of rainfed wheat and its effective factors in this county. For this purpose, the necessary data was collected from 217 wheat farmers in the cropping year of 2019-20. The results of estimating the translog stochastic frontier profit function along with the inefficiency function showed that the price of seed, labor, machinery, manure, herbicide, pesticide and area under cultivation as fixed inputs had significant effects on the profit from wheat production. The mean profit efficiency for all farmers was estimated to be 42/3 percent and some 66.5 percent of the farmers had a profit efficiency of less than fifty percent. In addition, the variables such as having highly educated family members, crop insurance, presence of pest in the field and harvesting method had significant effects on the efficiency of the studied wheat farmers. According to the results, paving the ground for easy and on-time access to required inputs and their optimal allocation as well as encouraging the farmers to use crop insurance might be suggested as effective measures to increase the profit efficiency of wheat farmers in the studied area.