The Effect of Size and Fragmentation of Agricultural Lands on Yield and Production Costs (case study: Garmsar's cotton farms)

One of the structural problems of agriculture in many regions of Iran, which cause high production cost, low yield and the loss of resources, is the land fragmentation and small-scale of producing farms. To this end, in this study the effect of farm size and land fragmentation on yield and production costs in cotton producing farms in Garmsar is conducted where these problems are widespread. By surveying the econometric and statistical criteria of some flexible production functions a suitable function, i.e. the translog function was employed. Data were collected by using and filling a planned questionnaire from some cotton farmers who were selected by using a twostage sampling techniques. In this production function farm size, the number of blocks, chemical fertilizer levels, and human labour as independent variables and the yield level is dependent one.The estimated elasticity of explanatory variables of farm size, the number of blocks, chemical fertilizer and human labour at 0.146, -0.00129, 0.383 and 0.056 respectively, show an increases of 1 hectare in farm size, the corresponding yield, will increase 505.39 kg.; the addition of one unit of labour and 100 kg of chemical fertilizer will lead to the increases of 193.6 and 13.22 kg in yield respectively. Moreover, an increase of one block to farm blocks will leads to the reduction of 4.5 kg in the yield. To show the effects of the farm size and land fragmentation on the production costs the variance analysis test, as well as Duncan ’s multiple rang test was applied. The farms were grouped on the basis of their size and on the number of fragments, and then the above-mentioned tests showthe difference of average cost between groups significant i.e., the average cost of one hectare in the farms with different sizes and different numbers of fragment are not equal. The least production cost was obvious in farms with 4-5 hectares and by increasing the number of farm fragments beyond 4 blocks, the production costs increases.