Resource Productivity Analysis of Small Scale Root and Tuber Crop Farmers in Niger State, Nigeria

M.A. Ojo, J.N. Nmadu, L. Tanko and R.S. Olaleye

No 161615, 2013 Fourth International Conference, September 22-25, 2013, Hammamet, Tunisia from African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE)

Abstract: The study examined resource productivity analysis of small scale root and tuber crop farmers in Niger State, Nigeria. Data used for the study were obtained from primary source using a multi-stage sampling technique with structured questionnaires administered to 150 randomly selected root and tuber crop farmers from the study area. Descriptive statistics such as means, standard deviations, frequency distribution table and percentages were used to summarize the variables used in the analysis while data envelopment analysis was used to empirically determine the resource productivity in the study area. The DEA result on the overall technical efficiency of the farmers showed that 6% of the sampled root and tuber crop farmers in the study area were operating at frontier and optimum level of production with mean technical efficiency of 1.00. Decomposition of technical efficiency also showed mean efficiency scores of 0.25 and 0.32 for overall technical efficiency and scale efficiency respectively meaning that, on average, the sampled farms were more scale efficient than they are technically efficient. The study further revealed that most of the farms could reduce total expenditures on the farm land, labour, planting material, agrochemical, fertilizer and capital inputs by 8.17%, 5.17%, 29.53%, 23.71%, 0.09% and 10.08%, respectively without reducing their current level of production. The study therefore recommended that root and tuber crop farmers in the study area should form cooperative societies so as to enable them have access to productive inputs that will enable them expand. This will as well increase efficiency of resource utilization. Also, since few farms were robustly efficient, the farmers in the study area, enhanced research, extension delivery and farm advisory services should be put in place for farmers to learn the best farm practices carried out on the robustly efficient farms. This will go a long way to increase the efficiency level of the farmers in the study area.

Keywords: Crop Production/Industries; Productivity Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/161615/files/O ... 0Nmadu%20et%20al.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaae13:161615

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.161615

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Fourth International Conference, September 22-25, 2013, Hammamet, Tunisia from African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().