The benefits of biogas as a livestock waste management technology: empirical evidence from mixed crop and livestock farming in Indonesia

The aim of this paper is to present some preliminary results from a study of biogas as a livestock waste technology in supporting mixed crop and livestock farming. Specific emphasizesis made on the effects of biogas technology adoption among smallholder farmers. The study used a cross sectional survey approach to collect data from farm households at Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia. We surveyed 312 farmers that consisted of 165 biogas adopters and 147 non-adopters in 2013. By using propensity score matching techniques, the research employed treatment effects analysis according to the nearest neighbor matching (NNM) to measure the benefits of adopting biogas technology. The results indicated that the biogas adopters were the farmers who had a longer formal education; owned more cattle; had better access to information about the technology and better access to the biogas installation’s aid program; although, they had less access to formal credit. The estimation of treatment effects showed that farmers who adopted the biogas technology gained benefits through decreases in crops expenses and increases in the livestock and non-agricultural income. Furthermore, the results showed that adopting farmers utilized the residue for crops’ fertilizer as a substitute for chemical fertilizers in order to reduce crop expenses. Another result indicated that there was a reallocation of labor from crop to cattle production. Together the results confirmed that biogas may be an important technology to obtain synergies between crop farming, livestock, and household in terms of mixed crop and livestock farming, as an Integrated Farming System (IFS) practice, at the farm household level. Although the biogas technology provided the alternative energy source for the household, the specific benefits as an energy source for the household have to be discovered in a future study.