Technical efficiency in dairy farms conducting educational tourism: an approach by stochastic frontier production function

When farmers undertake a new activity such as tourism activity, it is crucial that they enlarge or redefine their identity from that of a simple farm producer to a farm resource manager with a wider perspective. This paper evaluates how a farmer's identity influences the efficiency of main activity, milk production by providing an emerging new educational tourism service. To approach this aim, based on an analytical framework, this paper classified farmer's identity into two types: traditional identity that is oriented towards simple farm production and enlarged identity that is oriented towards viability of the educational tourism activity. The estimation result of stochastic frontier production function (SFPF) revealed that, although conventional technical inefficiency is overestimated when the identity effect is not considered, the female initiative on the tourism activity enhances the technical efficiency of milk production. Consequently, it is when policymakers try to design support measures to develop tourismrelated farm diversification, the perspective of the support measures for capacity building should be widened to include identity issues.