Published Paper Details:

Ethiopian GDP highly depends on the production and productivity of agriculture. Agricultural productivity is seen as one of the major contributors to the development process. It is, therefore, essential to study the performance of existing plantation technology systems in order to become informed about this development process. This study examined the factors influencing technical efficiency in barley farming in eastern zone of Tigray using a stochastic frontier production function in which technical inefficiency effects were assumed to be functions of both socioeconomic characteristics of the farmer and farm-specific characteristics of the two seed plantation technologies; namely row plantation system and traditional plantation system. In this research work paper the researchers select randomly 300 farmers comprising 155 row planters and 145 traditional planter farmers. The result from the descriptive statistics indicates that the farmers who use traditional plantation technology are producing on a lower production frontier than the farmers who practice row plantation technology and the result is also statistically significant at one percent in a two tail sample ttest. The results also revealed existence of high levels of technical inefficiencies in barley production, especially among the traditional sowing farmers. The study found that the magnitude of technical efficiency varied from one farmer to another and ranged from 42.4% to 75.4%, with a mean of 68.2%. Consequently, due to technical inefficiency farmers have lost close to 32% of the potential output. The main factors that influenced the degree of inefficiency were age of the household head, family size, livestock quantity, row plantation technology, access to irrigation and cooperative membership. Based on the findings from this study, the researchers recommend that farmers should have to get trainings on how to plant seeds, on the use of better techniques and application of fertilizer and other capital equipment. Moreover, the regional government should have to develop small scale irrigation schemes to enhance the productivity of row plantation technology. Last but not the least, though the result from the Tobit model and ttest statistics are significant, row plantation technology user farmers are on higher frontier than their counterparts. Thus integrating those who use traditional cultivation method can lead to more viable production and productivity in using this technology.