Determination of the optimal economic area for the conserved and managed pastoral units

Country pastures, are considered as major sources of sustained forage production and their preservation, restoration and development, is very important. Therefore, in recent years through carrying out range projects, their management and protection across the country has been assigned to the stakeholders. In this regard, since the year 1993, pasture lands in khorasan Razavi province has been partly assigned. Accordingly, the total goal of this study is to determine the economic scale of pasture considering the number of livestock productivity and the scale of the land and also assessing the technical and economic factors affecting the productivity of pastures. To this end, of the 221 range management project in Khorasan  Razavi  province, 38 projects of 11 cities have been selected using a two-stage cluster sampling. Questionnaires were completed in the year 2006. Then, the total productivity of the affecting factors was calculated using the Tornquist-theil Index and the optimal area of Range Management Projects was calculated taking into account the number of livestock productivity and the scale of the land. The Results of productivity model showed the optimum land area as  ​​267 hectares for any single stakeholder. Considering the average share of each beneficiary in Range Management Projects of Khorasan which is currently 253 hectares, the size of pasture lands in most Range Management plans, are economically suboptimal. The calculated optimal number of livestock units also is 3437 unit. Since the average number of livestock sampled in Range Management units is 4359, obviously the present number of livestock units in Range Management Projects, is over the desirable number in most projects; so, reducing the number of livestock units in these projects will eventually increase pasture productivity.