Abstract
The present study applied the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models to evaluate conventional and organic date farms resource management of Saudi farmers using 126 and 94 rural date farmers at conventional and organic farms respectively. Technical, assuming variable return to scale, and cost efficiencies among the respondents varied substantially ranging between 0.08 and 0.54, for Technical Efficiency, and ranging between 0.20 and 0.15 for Cost Efficiency at conventional and organic date farms respectively. A mean scale efficiency of 0.39 and 0.27 are estimated for conventional and organic date farms. The study showed that some of the decision-making units have scale inefficiency, suggesting that the decision-making units are not all operating at the optimal scale. Most of the respondents operated very far away from the efficiency frontier. The overall technical inefficiency among the respondents resulted more by scale inefficiency compared to pure technical inefficiency. Allocative inefficiency is worse than technical inefficiency, implying that the low level of overall economic efficiency is the result of higher cost (allocative) inefficiency and scale inefficiency (operating at less than optimal scale size). Solving allocation and scale problems is critical for improving date farm resource use efficiency of Saudi date farmers.