In modern agriculture, pesticides feature so prominently in growers’ arsenal to reduce crop damage caused by various pests and diseases. But their indiscriminate use can harm human health and the environment and, eventually, impact agricultural productivity negatively. In an era of an...

Bee-keeping and honey production has a long history in Hungary. Honey is an important and healthy food of people and it can be consumed without any human processing. The honey production has important role, too. Some researchers say that if honey bee will extinct the humanity in the world would...

The emphasis of education as a driving force for the growth of agricultural productivity can be dated back to the early 1960s. However, most empirical work failed to take into account of the fact that production technology changes with time and consequently obscure the true contribution of...

This paper examines potential of contract farming as a rural development tool by revealing its effect on productivity and income of small holders in tea production in north-western Vietnam. In the present research, three economic analyses are applied. First, the technical efficiency of tea...

This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...

With declining Irish potato production trends in Kenya this paper identifies and analyses factors that influence the economic efficiency of smallholder Irish potato producers in Kenya by drawing on data from random sample of 130 smallholder farmers from Nyandarua North district. A dual...

This paper presents an ex ante analysis of the private and social profitability of the introduction of Bt cotton for a major cotton producing area of northern Mozambique. Cotton is especially relevant to rural poverty reduction because smallholders often have few alternative cash earning...

In order to measure agriculture sustainability, the efficient use of inputs becomes a crucial issue. In this perspective, the analysts concentrate their attention on the total factor productivity index (TFP). In this view, Lynam and Herdt (1989) proposed the TFP as a suitable assessment of the...

The aim of this paper is to set-up the algorithm for determining the degree of workability of the soil, to help the owners of family farms to plan working hours of agricultural machines, i.e. with the machine park management. The plans, which would be made by use of these algorithms and based on...

Herbicides account for approximately 2.2% of total farm expenses and are applied to more than 80% of farmland in the USA. The widespread adoption of herbicides contributed to the increased and relatively cheaper productivity of modern intensively managed agricultural systems in developed...