Direct Marketing Strategies and Farmers’ Technical Efficiency in U.S. Agriculture

Farmers are increasingly using direct marketing strategies that include farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture arrangements to connect with consumers who prefer locally produced food. We examine the relationship between the increasing use of direct marketing strategies and technical efficiency, using stochastic frontier analysis method. The results show that, on average, the farmers that use direct marketing strategies are less technically efficient compared to the farmers that do not. However, this result is reversed for the largest quantile of growers, on average those who use direct marketing strategies are more technically efficient than those not