Productivity and Efficiency of Agricultural and Livestock Systems

Agricultural and livestock production systems are continuously confronted with new structural, operational, market, and environmental challenges, which pose threats to their future sustainability. Hefty expenses and high production costs that erode profit margins, increased competitiveness that threatens long-term economic viability, climate change that lowers yields and increases risks, compliance with environmental policies and regulations that add operational complexity to farms, aging workforce and rural depopulation that limit labor availability, new market and consumer demands for diverse, high-quality “green” products and compliance with sustainability standards that require adoption of new technology, and the integration of eco-efficient practices into farm management constitute the main challenges that must be addressed by farmers and processors to ensure the resilience of the food sector.

Within this framework, productivity and efficiency are fundamental for the viability of agricultural and livestock production systems since they directly influence economic performance and environmental sustainability. Productivity and efficiency are pillars of modern production systems, enabling farms to thrive economically while addressing the pressing challenges. In fact, efficiency and productivity are two separate concepts that are often blurred in modern scientific language. According to Fried et al. [1], the productivity of a producer means the ratio of its output to its input, while the efficiency of a producer expresses the comparison between observed and optimal values of output and input. Currently, efficient production combined with high productivity is central to discussions concerning rural policies and agricultural economic development. The adoption of new technology, improved production techniques, effective management practices, and supportive policies are essential to support farm activities and ensure that agricultural and livestock farms remain economically viable and capable of feeding a growing population.

The Special Issue of Agriculture, “Productivity and efficiency of agricultural and livestock systems”, seeks to provide insights regarding these issues. The main objective of this Special Issue is to bring together contributions from a wide range of disciplines relating to measurement, analysis, and improvements in productivity components, particularly innovation and the efficiency of crop and livestock production (agricultural economics, performance analysis, livestock production and animal husbandry, management sciences, operations research, environmental analysis, etc.) to highlight transdisciplinary advancements.

This Special Issue about the Productivity and Efficiency of Agricultural and Livestock Systems (PEALS) has a total of 13 papers, all of which are original research articles. These articles tackle a central challenge facing modern agri-food systems: how to raise productivity and economic performance while also safeguarding environmental quality and social viability. The contributions span crop and livestock systems, cover both developed and developing regions, and mobilize tools ranging from spatial econometrics and efficiency analysis (DEA) to policy evaluation, innovation assessment, and farm-level case studies. Collectively, they perform the following:

• Measure and explain productivity and efficiency at farm, sectoral, and regional scales;
• Identify policy, market, and organizational levers (e.g., investments, support schemes, trade/digitalization, clustering) that shift performance;
• Align productivity with sustainability, especially via green total factor productivity, nutrition-sensitive metrics, and low-input strategies; Showcase innovation in practice—from passive acoustic monitoring to breeding strategies and mobile beekeeping—illustrating how technology and management can convert constraints into performance gains.

Papers were submitted from various countries: China, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania (in collaboration with researchers from Benin), Serbia, and the USA (in collaboration with researchers from Rwanda and Ghana). The papers in the Special Issue about PEALS have been systematized into four coherent thematic blocks and are presented below:

I.

Measuring green-productivity and spatial efficiency dynamics. This part includes four contributions in total [2,3,4,5]. Each provides a new framework for a multidimensional productivity, integrating environmental values and revealing the specific geographic areas that require spatially coordinated policies. He et al. [2] map the way that provinces’ “green development of agriculture” co-evolve and identify the main drivers through a spatial network analysis and econometric modeling, while Dong et al. [3] examine the impact of citrus industry agglomeration on the green total factor productivity by employing the dynamic spatial Durbin model. In their study, Yang et al. [4] measure the efficiency of citrus farms in China via the use of fertilizers and explore alternative pathways that will reduce their use while maintaining yields and hence productivity at a certain level, while Gu et al. [5] construct an evaluation index system for the development of nutrition-sensitive agriculture in China and measure its development level using an entropy method.

II.

Economic viability and optimal farm structures. This part includes five contributions in total [6,7,8,9,10], all of which are focused on the economic efficiency of farms, efficiency determinants and on revealing optimal farm structures. Czubak et al. [6], using primary farm accounting data, investigate the impact of farm investments on the economic efficiency of production factors in Poland while Sokratis et al. [7], using Data Envelopment Analysis on primary data, estimated the efficiency level of sheep farms in Cyprus that operate under extensive, semi-intensive, and intensive systems and presented the main features of the most efficient farms. Pawłowski et al. [8] also delt with livestock farms in their study and investigated which pig-keeping systems are more profitable for pig producers using data from the databases of the Central Statistical Office, the FADN, and the Integrated Agricultural Market Information System of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Poland. Miljatović et al. [9] focuses on family farms in Serbia and evaluates their economic performance and sustainability over the 2015–2021 period using the opportunity cost approach, while Akpo et al. [10] assess the impact of different modes of access to land on agricultural productivity in small-scale farms in Benin using regression techniques.

III.

Production and management innovative solutions in livestock and apiculture sector. This part comprises two articles [11,12] that demonstrate practical innovations that convert biological and environmental variability into performance improvements. Šveistienė et al. [11] evaluate the effects of the controlled introgression of German Blackheaded Mutton rams on ewe prolificacy and lamb growth while preserving breed structure and integrity indicating enhanced flock management techniques, while Feketéné et al. [12], based on survey data from Hungary, evaluate how transhumant beekeeping practices affects apiary size, productivity, and resilience.

IV.

Technology and digitalization on farm efficiency. This part also includes two contributions [13,14] that examine how digitalization, knowledge, IoT and input flows can improve efficiency. Amenyedzi et al. [13] assessed farmers’ knowledge and attitudes toward acoustic technology for farm monitoring in Rwanda using survey data from 430 farmers, while Xu et al. [14] in their article adopt a stochastic frontier gravity model and a trade inefficiency model to analyze the influence of global digital trade development on the efficiency of China’s grain imports while simultaneously estimate the potential for trade expansion.

We believe that this Special Issue can be useful for scientists and practitioners related to crop and animal production, rural development and technological innovation in agriculture, livestock production and environment. Since it approaches and discusses various topics and concepts, the Special Issue about PEALS should reach wider interdisciplinary audiences and stimulate further research or produce practical ideas for implementation. Finally, we believe that the contributions will be of interest to young scientists who are engaged in these research fields and need to be introduced to the concepts developed in this Special Issue.