Technical efficiency and the adoption of multiple agricultural technologies in the mountainous areas of Northern Vietnam

•Adoption of traditional seed varieties significantly improves land productivity.•There is a positive relationship between natural land management practices and farm performance.•Dissemination of pest management practices by extension agents decreases technical efficiency.•The empirical results are largely robust against the hidden hazard of unobserved confounders. We examine the role of adopting environmentally-friendly agricultural technologies on the technical efficiency (TE) among maize farmers in the mountainous areas of Northern Vietnam. While technology adoption is non-randomly assigned to farmers, we draw on recent advances of machine learning models to identify farm adoption profiles of multiple agricultural technologies. Combining the stochastic production frontier with the inverse probability weights, we compare the TE between adopters and non-adopters. Although, farmers adopting new seed varieties achieve significantly higher TE than others, dissemination of integrated pest management practices by extension agents affect negatively farm performance. Results show that there is a positive relationship between actions to reduce the vulnerability of landscapes to soil erosion and corn productivity. We find heterogeneous effects of adopting multiple environmentally friendly technologies on TE. Farmers who are a member of cooperative and employ organic fertilizer are associated with higher odds to adopt new seed varieties. Maize cultivation in sloping land and farmers with large landholdings tend to be the key drivers in the provision of farm advisory services and the exertion of soil erosion control techniques. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the empirical findings are largely robust against the hidden hazard of unmeasured confounders.