Energy storage in field operations of sunflower production using data envelopment analysis approach.

This study applies a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to analyze the technical and scale efficiencies of farmers with respect to energy use for oilseed sunflower production in Golestan province, Iran. This study also helps to segregate the efficient and inefficient farmers, identify the wasteful usage of energy by inefficient farmers and to suggest reasonable saving of energy. The results revealed that total operational energy of 6771.1 MJ ha-1 was consumed for sunflower production and the irrigation operations had the highest share. About 64% of farmers were technically efficient and the mean efficiency of farmers was found to be 0.85 and 0.94 under constant and variable returns to scale assumptions, respectively. The results also revealed that, by raising the performance of inefficient farmers to the highest level, on average, about 9.3% of total operational input energy could be saved. Moreover, energy saving from irrigation operation had the highest share (76.9%). From this study improvement of timing, amount, and reliability of water applications and utilization of new irrigation systems with high efficiency is suggested to improve the energy use efficiency and to reduce the environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]