Energy Use Efficiency for Walnut Producers Using Data Envelopment Analysis (Dea) (Report‪)‬

Introduction Walnuts do not only provide healthy fatty acids and high calorie, they are also rich in vitamins and minerals that help us to stay healthy. It includes potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, calcium, zinc, copper, vitamin B9, B6, E, A and etc (Prasad, 2003). Currently, China, United States and Iran are the main walnut producer countries (FAO, 2007). Energy use in agriculture has developed in response to increased population, limited supply of arable land and desire for an increasing standard of living. In order to sustain agricultural production, effective energy use in agriculture is required, since it provides financial savings, preservation of fossil resources and reduction of air pollution. Therefore, research efforts have emphasized energy analysis of various agricultural productions for planning resources in the ecosystem, considering both acceleration of the pace of crop production and the efficient utilization of farm resources (Singh et al., 2002). Although numerous studies have been conducted on energy analysis to determine the energy efficiency of plant production, there are few studies on the energy use pattern and benchmarking of crops production (Chauhan et al., 2006, Diaz et al., 2004, Malana and Malano, 2006, Nassiri and Singh, 2009, Zhou, 2008). Recently DEA has gained great popularity in energy and environmental (E&E) modeling. DEA is a non-parametric analysis method to measure the relative efficiency of a homogeneous number of organizations that essentially perform the same tasks (Cooper et al., 2006). The aims of this research were to determine the energy use efficiency per hectare for the production of walnut, and compare input energy use in efficient with inefficient Decision Making Units (DMUs). This study will benchmark productive efficiency of selected walnut orchards in Iran by DEA. Basically, the most efficient DMUs are those for which there is no other orchard or linear combination of orchards that produce more of a product (given the inputs) or use less of each input (given the walnut products).