Technical Efficiency of Tomato Growing Farms - An Opportunity to Stabilize Agriculture Economy

Vegetables are the most affordable sources of valuable vitamins and minerals that reflect their nutritional potential for economic utility in the country. Moreover, tomato is considered a dominant vegetable globally, and in Oman in terms of production. Hence, the survey study was planned to investigate the technical efficiency of Oman's tomato growing farms. The survey research estimated and examined the technical efficiency of tomato growing farms of different governorates of Oman. A sample of 118 tomato farms was selected employing the multistage sampling technique. The interview schedules were adapted for data collection in 2016 and 2017. The maximum likelihood method was applied to adapt the Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production model for the collected data. After running various econometrics software, the output of the Frontier 4.1 was found a good fit. The study results showed that the technical efficiency of tomato growing farms ranged from 15% to 100%, with the mean technical efficiency of 64.2%. Among the inefficiency factors, education and experience of the farmers were found to significantly contribute to the technical efficiency of the farms. Therefore, there was a possibility to increase tomato output by 35.8% with the current level of inputs employed by tomato farmers. Tomato growing farms had enormous scope to improve their efficiency to raise their productivity through awareness programs and increasing skills of the farmers.