IIT Bombay researchers find smaller farms more productive than larger ones

Mumbai, Sep 16 (PTI) Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have found that smaller agriculture farms are generally more productive than larger ones in terms of yield per acre.

This was revealed in a study for which researchers relied on village-level studies from the Hyderabad -based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)'s data sets spanning over four decades - from 1975 to 2014.

"The relationship between farm size and farm productivity in the developing world has been debated for several decades. What our findings show is that smallholders still matter greatly for food security and rural stability, but they are increasingly vulnerable due to monocropping and high input costs.

"We believe the way forward is to strengthen the capacity of smallholders by improving their access to appropriate technologies, affordable credit, and reliable extension services," Prof Sarthak Gaurav from the Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay, and a co-author of the study, said.

The researchers, IIT Bombay and the University of Hyderabad, found that small farms were more productive, especially in the early years (1975-84).

Earlier studies have offered various explanations for this inverse relationship between farm size and productivity and the most common was that smallholder farmers tend to put in far more intensive family labour, give higher attention, and add more fertilisers per unit compared to larger landholders.

However, the new study found that even during those early years, the productivity scale was not as tilted towards small farms as previously thought. The inverse advantage of small farms was, in fact, statistically insignificant once the team controlled for the amount of labour and fertiliser that went into each plot.

"Both labour and non-labour inputs, such as seeds, fertilisers, and machinery, had a strong positive association with land productivity. This suggests that what matters is not just the size of the land but how effectively that land is cultivated," explained Gaurav.

The study also revealed that the inverse pattern has weakened in recent years, but not fully reversed, despite extensive mechanisation.

"We expected that with rising farm mechanisation and better access to markets, the relationship might turn positive by the later years. But even by 2014, the relationship had only shifted to an insignificant positive and had not fully flipped. That persistence tells us something important about how uneven or slow structural change can be in regions like the semi-arid tropics," the professor stated.

In a country where small farmers with less than two hectares comprise nearly half of the nation's farming population, the new findings have far-reaching implications in aspects, including food security, poverty alleviation, sustainability, agriculture policies, and land reforms in the agricultural sector, noted the study.

There is a need to prioritise improvements in smallholders' collective capacity to access markets and inputs, insisted Gaurav.

"Many of the challenges we observed were not just about farm size but about weak linkages to input and output markets, and limited access to knowledge or infrastructure. Helping smallholders organise into collectives or producer groups can enable them to pool resources, adopt agroecological practices, and negotiate better prices," he added. PTI SM RSY