Application of Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis for Ranking Dairy Farms in the View of Energy Efficiency

Fuzzy data envelopment analysis (FDEA) model was used to solve the ranking problem of dairy farms for milk production in Iran with ?-cut approach at eleven ?-levels. It is widely accepted that measuring precise data for production systems cannot show the real situations; to overcome this shortage, fuzzy data envelopment is of great interest, especially in efficiency assessments which data errors are important. Different energy inputs including fossil fuels, electricity, machinery and equipment, human labour, feed and water were considered as input factors and energy output (including milk and cow manure) was the output parameter in determining the efficient units. The total energy consumption was 53.1 GJ cow-1 and the top two energy consuming inputs as feed intake and fossil fuel drew the fact that promoting input utilization efficiency seems critical. The benchmarking process indicated that 24 farmers from the 50 target dairy farms are efficient. Two units were known as sensitive units to fuzzy situation. Also, units were ranked according to their efficiency score. This study showed that FDEA can be quite useful for ranking purposes in agriculture using imprecise energy data.