Application of Data Envelopment Analysis to Evaluate Efficiency of Commercial Greenhouse Strawberry

Investigation of strawberry greenhouses showed a big variation of data and high mean benefit to cost ratio (1.74), so the proper potential was seen for improvement of economic efficiency and management in strawberry greenhouses and detailed study was seriously required. In this study, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique was applied to investigate the degree of technical and scale efficiency of greenhouse strawberries of Iran, also to compare and optimize the performance of each greenhouse. Based on the amount of four important inputs: human labor (h/ha), fertilizers (kg/ha), capital ($/ha) and other expenses ($/ha), and gross return of strawberry ($/ha) as output. Mean technical efficiency was 0.73, indicating that there is ample potential for more efficient and sustainable input utilization in production and 27% of overall resources could be saved. The majority of the scale-inefficient greenhouses are operating under increasing returns to scale; efficiency analysis theory suggests that they are obviously small greenhouses that need to increase their sizes in order to achieve cost savings. Ranking of productive efficiencies based on the four mentioned inputs is also shown to differ significantly from that based on a single resource (labor).

並列關鍵字

Benchmarking ； gross return ； human labor ； return to scale

國際替代計量

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