Revisiting the Debate on Farm Size and Utilisation of Agricultural Land

This paper revisits the debate on the relationship between farm size and utilisation of agricultural land. Since the 1960s, a large number of studies have been examining this relationship and suggesting possible explanations supporting their thoughts. Three significant hypotheses exist in the literature forwarded by different scholars in this regard: an inverse relationship, a positive and a U-shaped one. Using the recent data from the Agriculture Census of India, this paper attempts to analyse the spatio-temporal trends of the relationship between farm size and land utilisation and examine the hypotheses and explanations already advanced, taking a state-level analysis in India. We found an inverse relationship where smaller farms are more fully and intensively used compared to the larger farms; however, the increasing share of unutilised land among the small and medium farms in the recent decade of 2005-2006 to 2015-2016 indicates a losing ground of small farmers because of ongoing agrarian distress

Agrarian society · Agricultural economics · Agricultural land · Agriculture · Census · Economic geography · Economics · Geography · Population · Sociology · Agricultural Economics and Practices · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Demography · Land Rights and Reforms

• Size, Productivity, and Returns to Scale

  Pranab Bardhan, Pranab K Bardhan•Journal of Political Economy•1973

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