An empirical method to measure the relative efficiency of irrigation methods in agricultural industry

摘要

One of the most important issues affecting future world is managing the existing waterresources. There is no doubt that global warming has created significant troubles on people'slives and it has caused shortage of water in the world. Therefore, we need to manage the waterresources by allocating appropriate methods. In this paper, we use data envelopment analysis tomeasure the relative efficiency of fourteen different irrigation methods. The proposed model ofthis paper uses four inputs including cost, risk, maintenance and expertise and two outputsincluding flexibility and durability of irrigation methods. The preliminary results indicate thattwo surface irrigation methods, two sprinkler irrigation methods and one subsurface irrigationmethod are considered efficient. Other irrigation methods are only as much as 50 to 94 percentefficient compared with these five irrigation methods.