Adoption of Improved Soybean Varieties and Differences in Technical Efficiency Between Improved and Local Soybean Varieties in Southern Shan State, Myanmar

This study determined the factors influencing the adoption of improved soybean varieties and examined the technical efficiencies of improved and local soybean varieties production in Southern Shan State, Myanmar. For this study, data from a sample of 337 respondents were collected by employing a multi-stage random sampling method. Logit model was adopted to determine the factors influencing the adoption of improved soybean varieties. Additionally, a stochastic production frontier was used to examine technical efficiencies of improved and local soybean varieties. Results show that factors that positively and significantly influence the adoption of improved soybean varieties are education, market access, extension access and training access. Examination of technical efficiency reveals that labor, fertilizer, machinery, and use of pesticide and harvester are inputs that significantly contribute to improving production efficiency among the improved variety farmers while seeds, labor, and fertilizer are significant inputs of local soybean production. On average, the estimated yield of the improved soybean varieties is 1.51 t/ha, which is higher than the yield of local soybean varieties grown at 0.88 t/ha. It was also revealed that improved soybean varieties had a relatively higher level of mean technical efficiency (85.04%) than local varieties (70.13%) and significantly different at 1% level. The results show that improved soybean production is more efficient than local soybean production. Therefore, government and non-government organizations should improve and provide market access, efficient and effective extension services and training to encourage farmers to adopt improved soybean varieties.