O. I. Baruwa

Department of Agricultural Economics Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Horticulture, 2018, Vol. 8, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/ijh.2018.08.0002
Received: 26 Dec., 2017    Accepted: 01 Jan., 2018    Published: 26 Jan., 2018

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.

Baruwa O.I., 2018, Resource productivity of smallholder vegetable (Corchorus olitorius) (L.) farms in Nigeria, International Journal of Horticulture, 8(2): 8-15 (doi: 10.5376/ijh.2018.08.0002)

 

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.

Corchorus olitorius; Resource use; Efficiency; Productivity; Profitability; Nigeria