Thesis Abstract of AGS Students

Evaluation of resource utilization and planning for optimal farm in Chom Thong land reform area, Chiang Mai province

Kesinee Ratanapesla (1993)

The Chom Thong land reform area (LRA) located in Chom Thong district, Chiang Mai province like many other LRA's, is droughty and has low productivity. Member farmers were allotted only about 5 rai of land. Yet 17 percent left all or part of their land idle. Thus, a research was con- ducted to investigate the efficiency of resource utilization of the Chom Thong LRA with the underlying hypotheses that 5 rai was too small to generate sufficient farm income for farmers' families and that they might have off-farm employment to supplement their income. The study also investigated opportunities to increase farm income.

303 sampled farmers were interviewed and classified into 4 different groups, according to whether they owned land only inside or both inside and outside the LRA, and whether they fully or partially cultivated the LRA land. Six major soybean and tobacco-based cropping systems including 177 observations were used for indepth investigation of the above hypotheses.

Generalized Least Squares (GLS) was employed to estimate the Cobb-Douglas production function, then values of marginal product of major inputs were calculated to analyze efficiency of resource utilization. Multi-period programming was used for optimum farm plan.

The result showed that most of the farmers occupied only the land inside LRA and about 34% had both inside and outside LRA land. Resources in the forms of LRA land and family labor were on the average of 5 rai and 3 persons, respectively.

Only 177 farmers of the major cropping systems were used for further analyses. In 1989/1990, the major cropping systems inside the LRA were tobacco monocrop, soybean monocrop, soybean-tobacco, soybean-mango, tobacco-mango and tobacco-tomato-mango cropping systems. Tobacco and tomato, labor intensive and high capital demand crops, were found more in the groups of farmers who partially cultivated the land while soybean, an inexpensive crop, was found to be cultivated more in the areas where the growers fully utilized their land. The farmers who partially cultivated the land reported that insufficiency of capital and labor and physical constraints of land were the major problems affecting their use of land resource. However, the land use intensity models showed that the total land owned and off-farm income had negative impact on the intensity. Nonetheless, incorporation of soybean raised the intensity while farm labor was not statistically important determinant in any group.

The data of the efficiency of tobacco and soybean production revealed that the elasticity of labor, fertilizer and other variable costs were 0.099, 0.241 and 0.198 and that of tobacco production and soybean production were 0.0, 0.139 and 0.195, respectively. Thus, the returns to scale of tobacco and soybean were 0.538 and 0.334 which exhibited the decreasing return to scale. This implies that for the present technology and prices, more fertilizer and less other inputs would raise resource efficiency.

The multi-period programming model suggested that for the average level of available resources and prevailing prices, tobacco monocropping was recommended for a full 5 rai. However, in the northern LRA where the farmers preferred soybean, the results suggested soybean-mango on 3 rai and the remaining 2 rai be utilized for soybean monocropping. Farmers could work in off-farm jobs for up to a total of 116.19 mandays. The optimal solution coincided with the actual phenomenon that the Chom Thong LRA farmers needed to rely on off-farm income and that the 5 rai area was too small to support their living.

The implication of the research is that for setting a land reform area one should take into account of suitable size of land for a given household size, opportunity to work off-farm and farmers' ability to allocate resource optimally for prevailing prices.

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