Abstract

The present study aimed to calculate indicators of productivity of dairy farmers in the municipality of Rolim de Moura, Rondônia, in the north region of Brazil and to evaluate the efficiency of producers by the perspective of productive efficiency, technical and scale. The data is of primary nature, gathered through questionnaires sent to 77 farmers of the Rolim de Moura municipality. The sample for this research consists of producers that are part of an agreement with SUFRAMA for the installation of cooling units. The efficiency measures were predetermined for each production units (Decision Making Unit - DMU), using the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and DEA-EDIS software v. 1.0. Initially, producers were divided according to the degree of efficiency and then compared by socioeconomic indicators in order to determine the level of the performance of the efficient and the inefficient producers. We concluded that in this group, there is a predominance of inefficient producers (efficiency scores less than 0.9), representing 83.12% of the sample. It is therefore a very low number of efficient producers (16.88% of the sample). In general, efficient producers showed successful production numbers. The main production factors that contributed to the inefficiency of producers were the operating expenses, productivity of both land and the herd, which was confirmed by the disadvantageous relationship between selling price and average cost of production. With this observation, milk producers considered technically inefficient should minimize the use of inputs mirroring for that of their benchmarks, because there is sufficient margin to support the reductions specified in the study presented.

Key words: Productivity, efficiency, livestock, milk.