Determination of Optimum Size for Rice Farms in Guilan Province

The production unit size is one of the effective factors in optimum uses of inputs. Since optimum size is affected by the characters and economical conditions in each district, the studies for determining the optimum farm size should be done specially for each crop and each district. In this study tried to determine the optimum rice farm size in Guilan province which is one of the most talented district for rice in Iran applying Translog cost functions to data collected from 280 farmers in the studied district who were selected by two stage random sampling method. The results showed increasing return to scale for all districts and for each town. Also the optimum sizes are 2.17 ha for province, 2.2 ha for Rasht, Somee sara 2.26 ha, Talesh 2.01, Astaneh 1.73 ha and Rudsar 1.47 ha. In general, the optimum sizes are larger than present average sizes. Due to results, encouragement of farmers to form cooperatives and convert of small farm to cumulative farms are recommended.