The purpose of the present study is to measure consumers' evaluation of rice that was produced harmonizing with ecological system using a choice experiment. One hundred and ninety four households living in the Mito city, Ibaraki, served as respondents and data collected from them was analyzed using a heteroskedastic extreme value model. Estimated consumers' value of the rice varied from 2,639 yen to 6,830 yen per 10kg according to the characteristics of respondents. Limited households are willing to pay it 6,000 yen per 10kg or more that is minimum price required to produce it. Therefore, it seems to reasonable to conclude that selling it at cost or more is not an effective way of diffusing ecologically friendly paddy fields to the area.

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Information system to support the proper use of agricultural chemicals (AC) is required in Japan. To build a database (DB) system of the AC use standards, which is suitable to check compliance with the standards digitally, we analyzed the numeric conversion possibility of the AC registration information (ACRI), and proposed a method to restructure the ACRI-DB.
We focused on three important items on AC use standards in the ACRI; "frequency", "amount", and "timing" of the use, and analyzed whether it is possible to convert their text contents to numeric values. In all records on the registered AC use standards, the percentage of records on which numeric conversion was easy was 98.0% on "frequency", 85.0% on "amount", and 52.6% on "timing". Based on this result, we created "conversion tables" to convert the text contents to numeric values on the foregoing three items, and restructured the ACRI-DB by using the tables. Additionally, we developed a trial Web application to retrieve the AC use standards digitally and quantitatively with this restructured ACRI-DB.
We compared this restructured ACRI-DB system with the other existing DB systems for ACRI, and demonstrated that the method of numeric conversion using the "conversion tables" was easier and more accurate. This result explained the practical validity of the method to restructure the ACRI-DB, which was proposed in this paper.

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This paper aims to measure the technical efficiency (TE) by identify sources it for corn production in Adana province of Turkey and to explain estimated TE by farmer's characteristics. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was applied to estimate individual score of TE, a relative efficiency index in production. Then, a censored two limit tobit regression model was used to explain the variation in the TE scores by specifying major farmer's characteristics as factors underlying behind. Data were collected by questionnaire from 50 individual farms that use similar inputs, produce the same product and expose to same natural and marketing conditions. Results showed that significant number of farms (68%) operate inefficiently in the survey area. DEA results showed that the quantities of inputs used by farmers were higher than what would be required to maintain the output level. Two limit tobit regression indicated that the variation in TE scores is related to farmer's characteristics such as education level, farm size, farmer's age and family labor. This study suggested that DEA is a promising mean for providing information to productivity improvement. Secondly, managerial capability of farm managers is recognized as an essential method for it.

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