Researcher of the month: Aditya Khanal

Aditya Khanal is relatively shy but a lively figure. He completed his bachelor’s degree from Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS), Rampur in 2006. After completion of his undergraduate with agricultural economics elective and a brief work as socio-economist in LI-BIRD in Nepal, he is pursuing his further education in applied economics in the United States. He Joined Louisiana State University (LSU) in 2008, and then Virginia Tech (VT) in 2010 for his further education. Currently, he is in his second year of PhD program. His current research areas include production and development economics. He likes to apply econometrics and statistics in economic assessment and modeling. His Master’s thesis, entitled ‘Adoption and Profitability of Breeding Technologies on United States Dairy Farms’ can be found here.

Through a SKYPE interview in May, we tried to find some more details about him and tried to learn more about his researches.

Find his recent journalarticle and conference paper on the links.

picture from http://goo.gl/53lNc

Aditya says his research on master’s thesis used data collected from farms all around the US (25 states). Not surprisingly, the farm sizes were much bigger compared to Nepal, 50-5000 cows. His intentions were to find attributes of a farm and a farmer that influence adoption of technologies like Artificial Insimination (AI), Embryo transplantation (ET) etc. and how the adoption of these technologies contributed to farm profitability. A major challenge in adoption and profitability study is to distinguish and single out the profit solely due to the adoption from that coming from the several other features such as farmer’s managerial capabilities, farm characteristics and so on. He says it is tricky because one can easily be misguided if they fail to control for these factors. In the quest, his research has applied an improvised mathematical and econometric expression, which he thinks can be applicable in similar research in other sector of sciences. They controlled for the biases and other factors influencing profit. With his findings from research, he can say younger and more educated farmer are more likely to adopt new technologies but that also depends on farmer’s interest on continuation of the business. He found general profits were bigger in larger farms compared to smaller farm with adoption of technologies but the marginal profitability decreased in very large farms. Research also found that a more specialized dairy farm would more likely adopt new technologies than a less specialized farm.

When we asked him how his research is helpful in Nepal’s context he said, “components and factors that I used in my research will not vary that much in Nepalese context as well although US farm sizes and characteristics were much different. More importantly, similar econometric modeling applied in my research can be used in similar research with general modification.’

Aditya also expressed his wishes for our effort.

Thanks for talking with us. Best wises for your future.


On behalf of AgCorner Team
Gunjan Khanal