International Journal of Horticulture, 2018, Vol.8, No.2, 8-15
8
Research Article
Open Access
Resource Productivity of Smallholder Vegetable (
Corchorus olitorius
) (L.) Farms
in Nigeria
Baruwa Olayinka Isiaka
Department of Agricultural Economics Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria
Corresponding email
International Journal of Horticulture, 2017, Vol.8, No.2 doi
Received: 26 Dec., 2017
Accepted: 01 Jan., 2018
Published: 26 Jan., 2018
Copyright ©2018
Baruwa, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Preferred citation for this article
:
Baruwa O.I., 2018, Resource productivity of smallholder vegetable (
Corchorus olitorius
) (L.) farms in Nigeria, International Journal of Horticulture, 8(2): 8-15
(doi
Abstract
Vegetable farming is an attractive business to small scale farmers in Nigeria. The paper focuses on specific potentials of
Corchorus olitorius
by estimating the level of resource productivity and costs and return to the vegetable production using farm level
survey data. Multistage sampling technique was used to obtain information from 200 farms in Oyo State, Nigeria using simple
random selection. The data were analyzed using budgetary technique and stochastic frontier. Results showed that ₦1 expended on the
vegetable farming, ₦0.09 is realized as profit. Benefit cost ratio was also estimated to be N1.09. However, all the factor resources
employed by the farmers were found to be grossly underutilized while the computed returns to scale (RTS) was 0.4826 suggesting
diminishing returns to scale. The findings show that there is a significant economy of scale to be exploited and that factor resources
could be well utilized by reducing technical inefficiency. The results have important implications for Nigeria’s agricultural input
supply policy, and more specifically for profitable vegetable farming.
Keywords
Corchorus olitorius
; Resource use; Efficiency; Productivity; Profitability; Nigeria
Background
Vegetable farming especially
Corchorus olitorius
(L.) required little capital investment which is of utmost
importance to resource poor farmers. However, potential for increasing the production of the vegetable faces a
significant threat from limiting resources. Given economic barrier and the fact that smallholder vegetable farmers
who produce the bulk of
Corchorus olitorius
in Nigeria are resource poor and lack access to credit facilities,
improving farmer’s efficiency without enhancing their resource base may be a viable option.
With the population growth rate of 5.5 percent as against food production growth rate of 3.2 percent annually in
the country, the need for an improved agricultural production system in Nigeria is paramount (Okunlola, 2009).
Therefore sustainability of vegetables production to meet the increasing demands in the country calls for attention
(Oladoja et al., 2006). One of the ways to increase vegetable output is improvement in efficiency of vegetable
production.
Earlier studies on efficiency of vegetable production (Emokaro et al., 2007; Onyango et al., 2008) worked on
efficiency using deterministic production function with mathematical programming techniques to compute the
parameters. However, there is an inherent limitation of the statistical inference on the parameters and resulting
efficiency estimates. To overcome this deficiency, Aigner et al. (1977) and Meeusen and Van den Broeck (1977)
independently developed the stochastic frontier production function which was used in this study. In estimating
the efficiency of vegetable production, this work employs statistical model which avoids the parametric
specification of technology and distribution assumption of inefficiency term which gives it an edge over past
works.
On theoretical basis, existing studies suggested that low productivity could be attributed to inefficiency in
resource use (Abang and Agom, 2008). Thus, this study describes the socio-economic characteristics of
Corchorus olitorius
vegetable producers; estimate the costs and returns to vegetable production and examine the
