Author
Listed:
- Rūta Savickienė
(Institute of Economics and Rural Development, Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, A. Vivulskio Str. 4A-13, LT 03220 Vilnius, Lithuania)
- Virginia Namiotko
(Institute of Economics and Rural Development, Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, A. Vivulskio Str. 4A-13, LT 03220 Vilnius, Lithuania)
- Aistė Galnaitytė
(Institute of Economics and Rural Development, Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, A. Vivulskio Str. 4A-13, LT 03220 Vilnius, Lithuania)
Abstract
The European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy aims to promote sustainable farming practices that ensure the responsible use of natural resources, safeguard biodiversity, and uphold higher animal welfare standards. One pathway to achieving these objectives is through the encouragement of extensive farming. However, the dairy sector in EU countries as well as in Lithuania has shown a clear trend toward intensification. The aim of this study was to assess the technical efficiency (TE) of dairy farms employing extensive and intensive technologies. TE was evaluated using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) combined with meta-frontier analysis, which accounts for technological heterogeneity. Prior to the efficiency estimation, farms were grouped into two distinct categories—intensive and extensive—using the k-means clustering algorithm. The empirical results show that extensive dairy farms in Lithuania are smaller in land area and livestock units, rely more on internal resources, and exhibit lower productivity compared to intensive farms. Intensive farms achieved higher technical efficiency, narrower technological gaps, and more optimal scale efficiency, indicating superior resource management. The weaker performance of extensive farms is attributed to both less advanced technologies and production inefficiencies.
Suggested Citation
Rūta Savickienė & Virginia Namiotko & Aistė Galnaitytė, 2025.
"Evaluating the Technical Efficiency of Dairy Farms Under Technological Heterogeneity: Evidence from Lithuania,"
Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 15(14), pages 1-20, July.
Handle:
RePEc:gam:jagris:v:15:y:2025:i:14:p:1469-:d:1697719
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jagris:v:15:y:2025:i:14:p:1469-:d:1697719. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.