Assessing the productivity effects of agricultural extension in a pluralistic system: an analysis of Brazilian family farming in 2017

ABSTRACT

Purpose:

This paper analyzes the impact of agricultural extension on the production of Brazilian family farmers, breaking down differences among extension providers.

Design/Methodology/Approach:

An Output Distance Function was estimated for Brazilian family farming using 5,463 municipality-level observations from the 2017 Brazilian Agricultural Census. The impact of extension on efficiency and technology was assessed.

Findings:

Rural extension services from public institutions, cooperatives, and private companies increased technical efficiency. Independent consultant services increased the adoption of more productive technologies and technical efficiency. However, public technical assistance increased productivity by 47.76%, technicians hired directly by farmers increased productivity by 31.25%, and technical assistance from cooperatives increased productivity by 31%.

Practical implications:

These findings could aid in the Brazilian Extension System’s goal of promoting productivity gains. The National Policy of Rural Extension has the ability to decentralize the role of the government and structure incentives to increase access to other providers based on these findings.

Theoretical implications:

This article expands the econometric estimation of Output Distance Functions to break down the impacts of extension on both efficiency and technology adoption.

Originality/Value:

Using readily available municipality-level data, this paper contributes to the understanding of the effectiveness of the different providers of rural extension for Brazilian family farmers and provides data regarding the impact on yield.

KEYWORDS:

• Extension agents
• technical assistance
• efficiency
• economic impact
• extension impacts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the resolutions of Law no. 11,326 / 2006 and the updates given by Decree no. 9.064 / 2017, FF is defined as the rural family entrepreneur who practices activities in the rural areas, has an area of up to four fiscal modules, employs predominantly family labor, earns at least 50% of the family income from activities developed inside of their farm, and whose farm is strictly managed by their family (Brasil, 2016). A fiscal module is a unit of land size defined by Law in 1979. Its size varies across municipalities, ranging from 69.2 to 988.42 acres.

2 A municipality is a geographical and administrative unit similar to a county in the United States, as it may encompass one or more urban and rural areas.

3 Separability is not a strong assumption here because this is a cross-sectional analysis and there are no activity-specific inputs in the inputs vector.

4 This mathematical formulation leads to a positively skewed distribution of the residuals and can be estimated through the Maximum Likelihood estimator for the cost function of Kumbhakar et al. (2015).

5 Gross Production Value is the product of the quantity produced and the output prices. Given that the estimation is performed using cross sectional data and assuming perfect competition, it is a convenient strategy of aggregation.

6 An integrator company is a company that contracts with farmers to buy agricultural outputs.

7 Sambuichi et al. (2016) analyzed the level of diversification inside Brazilian family farms through the Simpson Index of Diversification and found that 57% of the farms presented a value bigger than 0.35 for this index, which means relatively diversified production.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adauto B. Rocha Junior

Adauto B. Rocha Junior is an Assistant Extension Professor specialized in building decision-making capacity for farmers and policymakers by addressing public policies, production, and environmental issues using microeconomic theory, quantitative methods, and territorial analysis (GIS). He has experience with impact evaluation of public policies, family farming, livestock economics, and deforestation.

Joaquim Bento de Souza Ferreira Filho

Joaquim Bento de Souza Ferreira Filho is a Senior Professor specialized in Computable General Equilibrium Models for economic policy analysis, and his academic interests lie in the fields of economic policies for agriculture and natural resources, deforestation, land use, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental sustainability. He was the president of the Brazilian Association of Agriculture Economists – SOBER for two terms, and also a GTAP fellow.