Technical and economic efficiency of peanut production in Turkey

The primary objective of this study is to estimate the level of technical, economic and allocative efficiency for peanut production in the farms growing peanut in Turkey. The data, obtained from 90 peanut growing farms located in Adana and Osmaniye provinces, which together accounts for more than 80% of Turkey?s peanut production, were analyzed using Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis methods. Peanut yield, pure nitrogen, pure phosphorus, machinery operating time, labour and cost of pesticide were used in the analysis as variables of efficiency models.The results reveal that technical efficiency varies between 0,81 and 0,86, economic and allocative efficiencies are around 0,60 and 0,74 respectively. Technical inefficiency stems from the fact that farms produce much lower than their corresponding production frontier. Improvement of allocative efficiency appears to be relatively more important than technical efficiency as a source of gains in productive efficiency for the sample peanut growing farms.Efficiencies are positively correlated with education, planting area, and use of proposed levels of nitrogen, and negatively correlated with ratio of family labor, number of irrigations, and number of plots. However, only the effects of education, planting area and ratio of family labor were found to be statistically significant.