Productivity and efficiency impacts of conservation tillage in northwest Indo-Gangetic Plains

This paper is a micro-level investigation into the farm-level productivity and efficiency impacts of zero tillage (ZT), a prominent resource conservation technology in agriculture. Often heralded as more sustainable than its conventional tillage alternatives, ZT has a number of positive environmental impacts. While the agronomic and economic potentials of the technology have been documented in the researcher-managed field trials, its impact on farmers’ field is not clearly understood in South Asia. In this article, the on-farm impacts of ZT wheat are assessed using primary data from the state of Haryana, India, employing production function and semi-parametric technical efficiency estimation methods. Significant cost-savings (14%) associated with the adoption of ZT in wheat cultivation is verified in this study. The functional analyses also show a pronounced productivity increase (5%), and a small but significant improvement in the technical efficiency of production (1%) due to relatively earlier sowing of ZT wheat. All production inputs are associated with insignificant elasticity coefficients in the production function, indicating that they are already used at the yield-maximizing level. Size of the landholding and remoteness of the village are the two major factors that simultaneously enhance wheat productivity and technical efficiency.