mahmoud daneshvar kakhki

In this study, the technical efficiency and environmental efficiency of irrigated wheat producers in 31 provinces of the country were investigated by considering the emission of CO2 as an undesirable output during the years 1385-1397.

Data envelopment analysis and the Malmquist productivity index were used under natural disposability and managerial disposability. In the Malmquist index, the amount of wheat production was used as the desired output, and the amount of carbon dioxide emission from the production of irrigated wheat was used as the undesirable output. To determine the amount of CO2 emission, the carbon dioxide emission coefficients related to each production input and the amount of their use in the study area were used.

The results of the Malmquist productivity index with the absence of border crossing showed that under the natural disposability, Khorasan-Razavi has the highest index value. Kermanshah province has strong efficiency, and Fars has weak technical efficiency in irrigated wheat cultivation. Also, the results under managerial disposability showed that East Azerbaijan has the highest efficiency. Ardabil, Bushehr, Fars, Kermanshah, and Hormozgan, with ten years of Malmquist productivity index more than one, East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, North Khorasan, Kurdistan, and Lorestan had a six-year history of Malmquist productivity index less than one. The results of Malmquist's productivity index with the occurrence of border crossing show that under natural disposability, this index is more than one in all provinces. It is, although, under managerial disposability, less than one in all provinces.

Originality/Value: 

It is recommended that farmers' knowledge and awareness of the side effects of irrigated wheat production on the environment be increased through training courses and classes. Considering the climate change, the provinces that have more environmental efficiency in the production of irrigated wheat should be prioritized for cultivation.

Today, in developing countries, including Iran, migration from rural to urban areas is an important social and economic issue. Given the importance of the issue of willingness to stay in village, this study aimed at investigating the relationship between willingness to stay in village and effects of financial access through internal and external financing. The statistical population included the rural households of Gonabad, Torbat-e Heydarieh and Sabzevar counties in Razavi Khroasan province of Iran; and among them, 397 rural households were selected as the sample size. The extent of people's satisfaction with living in rural areas as dependent variable (low, medium and high satisfaction) and age, gender, type of activity, area under cultivation, income, and total value of assets, savings and access to formal and informal credits as independent variables were studied. To analyze the data, due to the existence of heterogeneity in the sample, the multilevel sequential logit method was used. To confirm the existence of heterogeneity in the studied cities and villages, the statistics of intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) and design effect (DE) index were considered, resulting in 0.25 and 0.48 values, respectively. Since these values were more than 0.2, the effects of intra-unit autocorrelation were evaluated as considerable and the existence of heterogeneity in the studied cities and villages was accepted; in other words, at the city level, the two main parameters of the number of banks in relation to the urban population and the urban wage rate showed about 0.25 variances between cities, and at the village level, the intra-unit auto-correlation of 0.48 indicated that the main variables of unemployment rate, the presence or absence of water resources and the average income level of the people included about 0.48 variance between villages, which these heterogeneity would provide a wide range of satisfaction to a large extent. Also, other research findings showed that granting facilities to rural households formally (rather than informally) could increase their motivation to stay in the village, and with these formal facilities, they would be able to start their own businesses in rural areas; hence, they might have more satisfaction and desire to stay in the countryside and not migrate to the city.

Today the incomes of the rural non-farm sector (ie the income from wage and self-employment activities in trade, production and services) are an important source of income for farmers and other rural households, including those without land. This has led policymakers to develop these activities in rural areas. For this purpose, the present study has considered the income structure of rural households in Neyshabur county and its related factors. The data is gathered through a questionnaire survey carried out on 380 rural households from four districts (Zabarkhan, Markazi, Sarvelayat and Mianjolgeh) in the Neyshabour county. The survey is conducted between September 2017 to February 2018. The household was chosen through a multi-stage stratified random sampling. In this study, according to various studies such as Davis et al (2017), rural household income is divided into two groups: farm income (crop, orchard and livestock) and non-farm income (non-farm self-employment, wage employment, pension- profit -rent and cash subsidy) have been divided and multilevel Tobit models have been used to investigate the determinants of rural household income in each of these groups. The results of the questionnaire show that 51.16% of the average income (21.19 million Tomans) of a rural household in Neyshabur in 2016-2017 from farm and 48.83% from the non-farm sector .The results showed that household head characteristics such as age, sex and education did not affect the farm income and the income of this sector was dependent on variables such as farmland size, farmland ownership, number of livestock and number of employees in the sector. In addition, the results revealed that higher education of the household head only affected non-farm wage income and access to credit only on non-farm self-employment income. It is noteworthy that the increase in the number of households employed if they were engaged in non-farm self-employment has generated more annual household income than all five groups of rural households.

Almost all rural communities in Iran are exclusively engaged with agriculture, therefore farming remains the largest source of income for them. Agriculture can be a major driver of growth for the Iranian economy. Therefore, increasing factor productivity in the agricultural sector is essential and by growing population rate, the need to invent more productive systems is highlighted. In this regards, smallholder agriculture, which is marked by low productivity should be transformed into agribusiness corporations which could foster the income and productivity of enterprises. Regarding the effective role of agribusiness corporations in enhancing agricultural productivity, and providing livelihoods and employment in rural communities, this study aimed at investigating the impact of location decision, social and human capital factors on the longevity of an agribusiness corporation called Khezri Agribusiness Corporation located in Khezri Township from Sothern Khorasan province. The reason for choosing Khezri Corporation as the case study was that according to surveys, this corporation has been one of the most successful agricultural associations for many years and has been able to create job opportunities to stop migration towards big cities. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to expendably investigate the factors affecting the continuity of an agribusiness corporation in Iran.

In order to achieve the objectives of the research, a well-structured questionnaire has been designed according to the literature review and using the opinions of university professors and experts of Khezri Agricultural Corporation. In this study, location factors, social capital and human capital are three main structures that are assessed by providing the information extracted from the questionnaire, and then, the impact of each structure on the continuity of the corporation's activity has been investigated based on indexing method. Each of the structures consists of different dimensions, and each dimension is measured by a number of items or questions using a Likert spectrum. Simple random sampling procedure was used to obtain the size of sample. At the end, the sample size was estimated at 45. Applying a systematic random sampling technique, the respondents were selected and the final questionnaire was distributed among them. At the primary analysis, 15 questionnaires were excluded from the analysis due to the large size of missing information. A total of 30 questionnaires were selected for further analysis. It is worth noting that in most cases, the questionnaires were tried to be completed in the form of interviews to increase the accuracy of the work.

Study findings suggest that location, social and human capital factors are at a high level of importance in the studied corporation. From the viewpoint of respondents, social capital had the greatest impact on the longevity of the corporation, followed by location and human capital. Furthermore, the communication dimension in social capital, the infrastructure factors in the location decision and the non-cognitive abilities in the human capital have been identified as the most influential components on the longevity of Khezri Agricultural Company's activities. Among the infrastructural factors, the criterion of "existence of basic resources" such as water wells, aqueducts, qanats, underground aquifers, etc. is the most effective criterion. According to 93.3% of respondents, this factor has a moderate to high impact on the corporation's location.

We recommend effective communication and planning in improvement of communication between organizational units and communication between managers and employees needs to be strengthened. Internalization of the organization's vision, mission, and goals, implementing a goal-based management plan, and applying the suggestion system in the organization and investing in formal and organized training are recommended as well to sustain the agribusiness corporations. It must be noted that given that the findings of this study are largely in line with the research background, its recommendations are expected to be applicable to the other agricultural business corporations in Iran. In addition, as we formerly discussed in the introduction of this paper,despite the benefits of agricultural corporations, few of these companies are currently active in the country. Therefore, analysis of factors affecting farmers’ decision to be involved in establishing agribusiness corporations should be the subject of future research.

Simulating decision-making process of agents of supply chain is affected by various economic and social factors. In this study it is tried to use the agent based simulation which is a conceptual and computational model and investigates the behavior of the agents of the milk and its products supply chain using data for the year 2016 by emphasizing on dairy farmers against the policy increasing raw milk prices. In this regard, bullwhip effect is one of the important issues raised in supply chain. The present study investigates the presence or absence of bullwhip effect in the milk supply chain and its products, using moving average method and order-up-to-level R. Improvement in supply chain performance is one of the major issues in the current world. Lack of coordination in the supply chain is the main drawback of supply chain that many researchers have proposed different methodologies to overcome it. In addition, the application of agent-based simulation has been investigated in order to improve performance indicator in supply chain. The results obtained from the present study indicated that there is the bullwhip effect in the supply chain, then, the agent managed supply chain has been proposed in order to improve one of the performance indicators in the supply chain. Using centrality in decision-making in the supply chain and agent-based simulation, the results indicated that bullwhip effect is reduced or eliminated for the dairy products. Such results highlight the importance and high potential of agent-based simulation in improving the performance indicator of chain.

In this study, the impact of different food groups’ consumption, social and economic indicator on the share of food in household expenditure in the rural and urban area of Iran investigated. For this purpose, panel quantile regression considered as the best technique. The results indicated that the impact of social and economic indicators and food groups’ consumption varies in different quantiles. Moreover, between social and economic variables, income, food price index and literacy rate considered as the most effective determinants of food expenditure in rural and urban areas. Furthermore, consumption of cereal and dairy in a rural area and cereal and vegetables in an urban area do not affect the household’s food expenditure; on the other hand, increase in consumption of meat and crop oils in rural and urban area upsurge the share of food in the household expenditure. Based on the results, the implication of policies, which lead to household income improvement and stabilized the food price can improve food availability in both rural and urban areas. Besides, the introduction of the innovative and stable method of dairy and vegetable production in a rural area and encouraging the urban household to consume more vegetables results in more diverse diet and enhance the food security and simultaneously don’t increase the share of food in household expenditure.

Sustainable development is now considered in many developing countries as the main economic approach for reducing poverty and improving living standards and enhancing environmental protection. Therefore, the use of appropriate tools to achieve the goals of sustainable development in rural areas has been very important. In this regard, the microcredits has been proposed as an effective tool in sustainable rural development. So the purpose of this study is to answer the question of what will be the impact of microcredit on the economic, social and environmental sustainability of rural households? In order to answer this question, 309 questionnaires were completed from the households of the villages of Torbat-e-Jameh County and the combination of propensity score matching regression approach and bootstrap algorithm was used. The results showed that the microcredit has a positive effect on economic and social indices, however, its impact on the environmental index is negative. In order to increase the validity of results the confidence interval was estimated. Furthermore, the Rosenbaum sensitivity analysis revealed that the sensitivity of the results of economic and social indices, even with a fourfold increase in gamma, is still significant. Also, the probability of a difference in the treatment group due to unobserved factors (or gamma) should be increased to 3.2 to change the effect of microcredit on the environmental index. Given the importance of microcredit at the rural communities due to the process of economic and social development, and also, its impact on the reducing of negative effects on the living environment, it is recommended that the government should support microfinance institutions and provide a legal and environmentally friendly framework to expand microcredits.

Rural non-farm sector(RNFS) comprises all economic activities –such as manufacturing, transport, commerce, banking, service and so on) in rural areas expect cropping, agriculture, livestock, husbandry, hunting, fishing, and forestry. So, RNFE means employment of rural household members in the nonfarm sector, and RNFI is the income thereby generated. Various studies have shown that nonfarm activities play an important role in reducing rural poverty, increasing incomes and improving rural household’s well-being. The present study tries to investigate the effect of non-farm employment on rural household’s consumption expenditures in Neyshabour county. 

The data is gathered through a questionnaire survey carried out on 380 rural households from four districts (Zabarkhan, Markazi, Sarvelayat and Mianjolgeh) in the Neyshabour county. The survey is conducted between September 2017 to February 2018. The household was chosen through a multi-stage stratified random sampling. The propensity score matching approach is used to examine the impact of participation in non-farm activities on householdconsumption expenditures. The method compares the consumption expenditures of non-farm households with their counterfactual group that did not diversify into such activities, depending only on  farm activities. The propensity score is defined P(Xi) as the conditional probability of receiving a treatment (employment in nonfarm activities) given pre-treatment characteristics: (1)   Where Xi denotes a vector of pre-treatment characteristics of household i such as household head characteristics, agricultural characteristics and household characteristics ; b(xi) is the logistic conditional function and F(b(xi)) represents logistic cumulative distribution frequency. In propensity score matching analysis, the average treatment effect on the treated (ATET) is important. It is computed by matching farm and non-farm households that are closest in terms of their propensity scores and calculated as follows. (2) ATET (X) = E(Y1i | Ti = 1) - E (Y0i | Ti = 1) Where, E(Y1i | Ti =1) represents the expected consumption expenditures outcome of households engaged in non-farm activities and E(Y0i | Ti=1) denotes the counterfactual  consumption expenditures of households without these activities. The counterfactual estimates represent what the consumption expenditures outcome of  households engaged in non-farm activities would be if they have not engaged in non-farm activities.

Survey of 380 households showed that 267 households were engaged in non-farm employment and 113 households had only agricultural activity. The results showed that household's characteristics such as the age of household head, household education, farmland size, livestock ownership, amount of credits and agricultural assets (water value and agricultural machinery) and household asset for the households engaged in non-farm activities and they have not engaged this activities were significantly different but after matching propensity scores of two groups, differences were removed. In other words, the mean of independent variables in the two groups wasn't significantly different. Also, results indicated that participation in non-farm employment has a positive effect on household consumption expenditure as a measure of welfare. So that, based on the average treatment effect on the treated (ATET), annual consumption expenditure of the households were engaged in non-farm employment was 1420 thousand Rials more than consumption expenditure of households without these activities. 

The result of examining the impact of participation in non-farm activities on household consumption expenditure showed that participation in these activities has a positive effect on household consumption expenditures. Therefore, in order to, non-farm activities have more sustainable income and less risk than farm income, it is suggested that non-farm activities be expanded by strengthening and expanding existing industrial parks.

Over the last two decades, awareness of resilience and sustainability and also efforts to reduce unsustainable production patterns have significantly increased. Hence, it is crucial to examine the resilience and sustainability of production systems. Resilience explains how well production systems withstand and/or rebound from aberration. Sustainability concept based on Commission’s words is: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. The important issue relevant to resilience and sustainability and the resilience of farms/agricultural systems is, whether resilience or sustainability can be considered as a property of a system or needs to be understood as a process. Since both of them are not essentially opposed but have various theoretical and methodological implications, it is necessary to define a resilience and sustainability indicator. So, it is required to have an intelligent objective function for fairly balancing between production systems and dimensions of sustainable production to fulfill economic benefit and the resulting environmental benefit, etc. Based on the existing published literature, studies focusing on both resilience and sustainability indicators in industrial dairy farms by using multi-objective non-linear programming and swarm intelligence algorithm have not been carried out. Therefore, it is the aim of the present study to design the “automata resilience and sustainability indicator” for industrial dairy farms. The objective function has a hierarchical structure and in order to integrate these pillars into a single score, a value between zero and one, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used that the value of one means complete sustainability.
Material and The objective function should be maximized which has 5 main indicators including, environmental, economic, social, technological and political issues. Each indicator has some sub-indicators. So, we designed and modeled formulas for all of them. The value of objective function is normalized, therefore, its maximum possible value is "one", which indicates the complete resilience and sustainability of dairy farms. The resilience and sustainability indicator is obtained at three levels. Eight types of constraint sets are considered. Then, the model has been implemented using data of 30[1] industrial dairy farms in Khorasan-Razavi province of Iran during 2016.   The resilience and sustainability indicator across all farms was obtained 0.43 and which was low. One of the main reasons of unsustainability and inflexibility of dairy farms under study is the unsuitable use of resources and inputs. Therefore, the proposed model (Automata Resilience and Sustainability Indicator Model) was designed and optimized. Based on result the optimum resilience and sustainability achievable for the proposed dairy farm is 0.9598 (95.98%). Thus, the proposed model succeeds in determining the dairy farms' resilience and sustainability. Furthermore, it helps in setting up other operational parameters as determining the amount of cow manure produced, the man-working hours and labor expenditure.  The obtained results should be further used as guidance for improving the resilience and sustainability of the manufacturing operation in dairy farms.   This study has introduced a formulation for a resilience and sustainability problem in process of production in the industrial dairy farm. The contribution of the proposed formulation is its ability to addresses all pillars of resilience and sustainability at the producing level. One of the main advantages of the proposed measure of resilience and sustainability is data collection that relies on data usually collected in all farms for revenue and cost analysis, cattle diet and quality control. This fact makes the model applicable to facilities introducing resilience and sustainability concepts. Thus contributes to promoting the implementation of sustainable practices in agricultural production, especially in developing countries, where still have a lack of resilience and sustainability awareness and related legislation. Using weight is important to the application of the objective function and also makes the model suitable for its intended usage in the dairy farms of developing countries. This model is applicable in the area of the optimum dairy cattle nutrition, rising profitability, reducing feed cost, decreasing GHG, managing the water and energy consumption, etc., by maximizing resilience and sustainability in dairy farms. Additionally, the results allow also for identifying the prospective measures for improving resilience and sustainability. Through results analysis, a strategy for developing resilience and sustainability can be well defined. Furthermore, the current research can be extended by integrating the model with life cycle assessment results, another producer support policies, dairy farms' capacity expansions and could also be applicable to other forms of agricultural systems by a bit changes in the decision variables and model parameters.4- This data was gathered based on non-random sampling. Because, in non-random sampling, the sample individuals are selected among individuals who have a defined characteristics and based on researcher's opinion. The proposed model is designed for a sample dairy unit. In other words, the data obtained from non-random sampling were used only to determine the status of the studied samples.

Climate change is one of important issue in agricultural sector in Iran. Because this issue with affects crops’ yield that leads to increasing productivity risk. On the other hand inputs has effect on crops’ yield. So, the aim of this paper is investigating the effect of controlled inputs in production and climate factors on average and performance fluctuations in selected agricultural production in Khorasan Razavi province (wheat, barley) as strategic agricultural products over the period of 2011-2015 by using the Just & Pope model. The results show that in the function of the mean yield, a millimeter increase in the logarithm of precipitation leads to increase in the average yield of rain-fed wheat, rain-fed barely and blue barley at levels of 0.11, 0.04 and 0.24 kg per hectare, and a reduction of 0.57 kg per hectare for blue wheat. An increase of 1 degree Celsius in the logarithm the mean of maximum temperature leads to decrease by 0.02, and 0.1 kg per hectare in the mean yield of blue wheat and blue barely respectively, but the average yield of rain-fed wheat and barley increase by 1.28 and 0.17 kg per hectare respectively. Also, logarithm of the cropping area, mechanization coefficient, nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide had a positive effect on the mean yield. According to the results of the yield risk function, transmittance in precipitation leads to increase the yield risk in blue wheat, rain-fed wheat and rain-fed barely to 0.27, 3.65 and 2.83 kg per hectare and increase in logarithm the mean of maximum temperature leads to decrease 0.69, 5.30 and 6.13 kg per hectare in the yield risk of those products. Based on the results obtained in the function of mean and performance risk, risk management tools include Weather-Based insurance for agricultural products and the use of drought-resistant seed varieties, in order to prevent the risk of production and reduce the vulnerability of farmers to inputs and climatic factors is suggested.

Considering the current challenges of agricultural insurance such as high implementation costs, problems caused by asymmetric information, and agricultural insurance’s being loss-incurring, presenting a proper insurance model is one of the most crucial issues in the field of agricultural products risk management. Thus, given the world successful experience, this study has designed the weather-based index insurance for apple in Damavand County, as one of the biggest apple production center within country. Data were collected during 1987-2016 from Iranian Agricultural Organization and the Meteorological Station in Damavand County. With the frequent application of Archimedean and elliptical copula functions in modeling the multivariate risk, dependency structure between weather variables and apple yield was determined through these functions, and Bayesian approach was employed to estimate the copula parameter. The investigation of different types of copulas indicated that Joe copula was able to model the joint distribution way better than other copulas. Hence there is a strong positive asymmetric dependency structure between variables. The expected loss caused by inappropriate weather condition has been 64281.25 ton for the Entire County. Therefore, the premium amount for each hectare at 100 percent coverage level had been computed as 36348910 Rials. The results of indemnity function demonstrated that frost is the most important loss factor for the apple product in Damavand County. Given the successful results of this insurance system in the world, it is recommended that officials and policy-makers investigate the weather based index insurance plans in different countries and identify its different dimensions to implement this insurance system in the country

Due to the performance of subsidies targeted، present study has been done to examine the effects of results of the implementation of this law on production activities. Social accounting matrix of 2001 was prepared and then general equilibrium model was developed. Gasoline and diesel have two prices، so two scenarios were simulated. The results of the two scenarios showed that، targeted subsidies of energy carriers، reduces product in production activities، increases price of commodities، and decreases households'' consumption.

In this study the role of management in rural production cooperatives was considered. To estimate and analyze the wheat and barley performance model, while considering control variables, forty cooperatives were selected in the crop year 2006-2007. The results indicated that the innovativeness (0.29 and 0.28) had the highest impact on the performance of wheat and barely. The generation of cooperation spirit had a coefficient equal to 0.24 in relation to the performance of barley and 0.12 in relation to the performance of wheat. The coefficients of practical experience indicated that 0.18 and 0.23 of variations in the production performance of rural cooperatives related to this variable for barley and wheat respectively. The coefficients of specialized knowledge were 0.09 for barley and 0.13 for wheat.

In recent years natural resource economists have made several attempts to value and assess the role of natural resources in the provision of human welfare. This study is an attempt to calculate the existential value of Zoshk summer resort using conditional valuation method. The people’s willingness to pay is measured using a logit model. In addition, Tobit model is used to study the contributing factors to the level of willingness to pay. The results of study show the monthly average level of willingness to pay is 11300 Rials(135600 Rials annually) for existential value of Zoshk summer resort.