Technical Efficiency in Fig Orchards: The Role of Residual Soil Nitrogen and Nitrogen Volatilization in Babylon Governorate during the 2024 Production Season

• Diaa Abbas Abu Duaila 1*, Usraa Traiq Bakr2

  Author

The present study was aimed to study the effect of the nitrogen resources (volatile and residual) on a sample of fig trees in 2024 with 100 orchards as well as studying the technical efficiency of the fig orchard in Babylon Governorate in 2024. The volatile nitrogen (-0.254) and family labour (0.66) were significant at 1% and 5% level respectively in the SFA while others were not significant. The difference between the results was attributed to technical inefficiency in the case of the gamma valuewhich was close to unity (0.99). The overall average efficiency was 0.66 and the productivity gap was 34% and only 27% of orchards had efficiency over 81%. The value of technical efficiency was observed to be inversely related with the volatilisation in the range of 11.7 kg/dunum to 2.1 kg/dunum. The study concluded the benefits of the increased input were not as large as the benefits from increased technical efficiency and reduced N loss, The Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approach was employed to estimate the production frontier and farm-level technical efficiency scores using Frontier 4.1. The production function included family labor, hired labor, pesticides, applied nitrogen, volatilized nitrogen, and residual soil nitrogen, whereas the inefficiency model included orchard size, educational level, and farming experience.

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