Technical and Allocative Efficiency in Off-Season Cabbage Production: A Farm-Level Multi-Method Assessment

Abstract

Background: Efficient utilization of agricultural inputs is fundamental to improving farm productivity and economic performance in crop production systems. In input-intensive crops such as cabbage, the profitability of cultivation depends not only on the level of input use but also on their optimal allocation. Imbalances in the use of key inputs, particularly fertilizers and plant protection chemicals, can lead to diminishing returns and increased production costs, thereby reducing overall efficiency. Such inefficiencies are of particular concern in off-season vegetable production, where higher input intensity and market-driven incentives amplify the economic consequences of suboptimal resource use. Aims: The study was undertaken to analyse allocative and technical efficiency and their implications for resource use in off-season cabbage farming. Study Design: A farm-level study based on primary data collected through simple random sampling with proportional allocation. Methodology: The study was conducted using data from 80 off-season cabbage farmers. Cobb–Douglas production function was employed to estimate allocative efficiency, while stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) was used to estimate technical efficiency. A Tobit regression model was applied to identify the influence of socio-economic factors on technical efficiency. Results: The results revealed significant allocative inefficiency across farm categories. Seed was underutilized (2.63), while labor was overutilized (-2.79) while fertilizer was underutilized in marginal farms (4.51). In small farms, seed (-3.84) and labor (-4.07) were overutilized, whereas fertilizer (2.65) was underutilized. In the stochastic frontier model, γ = 0.9988 indicated that the composite error variance was largely attributable to the inefficiency component relative to random noise, while σ² = 0.00123 reflected low overall dispersion in deviations from the frontier. The mean technical efficiency was 97.5 per cent, indicating that farms operated close to the production frontier with limited variation. Tobit results showed that age, farm size, and labor availability were statistically insignificant, implying a homogeneous efficiency structure across farms. Conclusion: The results suggest that the primary scope for improving performance in off-season cabbage production lies in enhancing allocative efficiency through rationalization of fertilizer and plant protection chemical use, given the relatively high and homogeneous levels of technical efficiency across farms.