No Evidence of Trade-Off between Farm Efficiency and Resilience: Dependence of Resource-Use Efficiency on Land-Use Diversity.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27662475.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0162736 and PMC identifier 5035069.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Efficiency in the use of resources stream-lined for expected conditions could lead to reduced system diversity and consequently endanger resilience. We tested the hypothesis of a trade-off between farm resource-use efficiency and land-use diversity. We applied stochastic frontier production models to assess the dependence of resource-use-efficiency on land-use diversity as illustrated by the Shannon-Weaver index. Total revenue in relation to use of capital, land and labour on the farms in Southern Finland with a size exceeding 30 ha was studied. The data were extracted from the Finnish Profitability Bookkeeping data. Our results indicate that there is either no trade-off or a negligible trade-off of no economic importance. The small dependence of resource-use efficiency on land-use diversity can be positive as well as negative. We conclude that diversification as a strategy to enhance farm resilience does not necessarily constrain resource-use efficiency.