Irrigation and farm efficiency in Brazil

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate how irrigated areas with flooding, furrows, sprinkler, centralpivot, drip and other methods of irrigation as well as the source of water used to irrigation influence the technical efficiency. Furthermore, we evaluate the behavior of the technical efficiency by farm size. The TE scores are obtained through the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA), which simultaneously models the production technical inefficiency. The results showed that, initially, there is a positive and linear relationship between efficiency and farm size, however, when the farms reaches 100 hectares the relationship becomes inverse, characterizing U-inverted shape. In general, the irrigated areas with different methods of irrigation and the source of the water have a positive influence on the technical efficiency of farmers. Other factors such as cooperatives membership, education, experience and rural credit also have a positive influence on efficiency. Finally, we conclude that large farmers are less efficient than small-scale farmers