5. Levels and Efficiency of Agricultural Development

This chapter deals with two objectives. The agricultural development and crop diversification linkage, their efficiency, and direction of both by land size groups in sample villages are the first objective. And, the second is to find out the factor that influences agricultural development and crop diversification by land size classes. One hypothesis on “whether agricultural development ensures efficiency or not” is tested. The primary data generated through the field is used in the chapter. This chapter explains a brief importance of field work in geography followed by overview of sample villages, soil quality, status and factor of development and diversification, and finally efficiency of agriculture. The simple percentage, standardized composite index, Gibbs-Martin diversification index, Yang’s yield index, cropping intensity, principal component analysis (PCA), data envelope analysis (DEA), and T test have been used for successful data operation. This chapter brings out that the selected indicators of agricultural development and diversification explain more than 70% of total cumulative variance where soil quality, ensured irrigation, and socioeconomic quality of farmers are better. It also posits that the high level of agricultural development is not ensured as a good performer as low or medium development villages do. The t-test summary at 0.000% significant level confirms that the increasing inputs may raise farm outputs, but in the same amount of agricultural inputs, outputs would not necessarily be high.