Measurement of Smallholder Farmers’ Goals: An Evaluation and Suggestions

In developing countries smallholder farmers are generally involved in subsistence farming whose aim is to maximize utility rather than profit. Researchers have found that in order to maximize their utility, farmers commonly consider multiple goals in their decisions, especially crop combination decisions and allocate their limited resources accordingly. A fuzzy pair-wise comparison method has been used to estimate empirically the weights for a multiple-goal objective function of smallholder farmers of Muzaffarpur district of north Bihar, India.