Organization Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Agricultral Sciences, Dharwad, Karnataka, India

Year 2009

Karnataka is one of the nine major cotton-growing states in the country. Of late organic cultivation of colored cotton has carved a niche entry in Dhrawad district of Karnataka under the platform of colored cotton under organic farming. Agricultural Research Station, Dharwad under the jurisdiction of the University of Agricultural Sciences is working on the improvement and development of naturally coloured cotton DDCC-1 since 1995-96. It has identified almond colored variety DDCC-1 (Dharwad Desi Colored Cotton-1) also supplies the seeds for multiplication to farmers under technical supervision. The present study was conducted, entirely based on a purposive sampling frame work for collecting data from 80 farmers contracted for organically cultivating naturally coloured cotton variety DDCC-1 from Uppinbetageri village of Dharwad taluk: The study pertained to the agricultural year 2005-06. The resource use efficiency, estimated using the Cobb Douglas production function, revealed that the inputs land (area under colored cotton), seed, farmyard manure and human labour would improve gross returns if their use was further augmented. Similarly bullock labour, biopesticides and trichocards would also improve returns but their estimation was not statistically significant. Overall, there was an increasing returns to scale. But the MVP to MFC ratios indicated that except for bullock labour, all other inputs could be profitably increased. The Timmer and Kopp measures of efficiency employed in the study indicated that there was surplus usage of all the resources above the frontier level ranging from 4.65 per cent to 23.75 per cent. Three-fourths of the farmers operated at the 70-80 per cent level of technical efficiency or at an average of 0.75654 technical efficiency. The allocative efficiency was 0.585 while the economic efficiency was 0.443.