Fossil-based fuels and electricity energy inputs effect on egg production in poultry farms of Iran

Energy use pattern analysis has been the subject of many researches in agricultural production systems; however livestock farming has not been thoroughly considered. Determining the impact of fuel and electricity on egg production is the purpose of the present study. To achieve this, firstly, data were collected by interviewing randomly selected poultry farmers and then the culled data were transformed into energy equivalents. Cobb-Douglas production function was chosen as the best suitable production function among the examined ones. The sensitivity analysis was carried out by estimating the MPP factor. Accordingly, fuel had negative effect on egg yield but electricity increase did not have any negative influence on poultry farms output. To manage better fuel use, employing state of the art technologies and strategies to optimize the energy consumption is strongly recommended.