Willingness to adopt energy-efficient irrigation technologies and technical efficiency of Boro rice production in Bangladesh

Sustainable irrigation is vital for Bangladesh’s rice sector but increasingly challenged by groundwater depletion, rising fuel prices, and energy-intensive pumping. This study identifies factors influencing farmers’ willingness to adopt energy-efficient irrigation technologies (EEITs) and evaluates production and cost efficiency using data from 347 Boro rice farmers across four agro-ecological regions. Firth logistic regression results show that education (OR = 1.263) and distance to irrigation source (OR = 1.002) are significant at the 1% level, while groundwater use compared to surface water (OR = 1.711) is significant at the 5% level. Overall, all three variables positively influenced adoption decisions. Production frontier estimates indicate that farmers operate close to the efficiency frontier, with limited scope for yield improvement through efficient resource utilization; however, irrigation and land preparation expenditures show negative associations with productivity; because these variables may be jointly determined with yield, we treat this result as descriptive only and do not use it as evidence of farmer inefficiency. Cost frontier results indicate that production costs are primarily driven by input expenditures particularly irrigation, pesticide, fertilizer, and tillage costs, while cost efficiency is uniformly high across farmers, with no statistically significant differences between irrigation system types. Comparative analysis shows that groundwater users achieve slightly higher yields and production efficiency, but does not vary meaningfully by source, and that adoption is instead motivated by resource sustainability. Overall, the results show that institutional, informational, and accessibility-related factors may have a greater impact on desire to adopt EEITs than do current levels of cost-efficiency performance.