ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY OF SMALL-HOLDER WHEAT FARMERS AROUND HADEJIA VALLEY IRRIGATION SCHEME IN JIGAWA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study analyzed economic efficiency of small-holder wheat farmers around Hadejia Valley Irrigation scheme in Jigawa, State Nigeria. Multi-stages sampling procedure was used to select 346 wheat farmers from the study area. Data were collected with the aid of questionnaire. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyzed the data.  The stochastic frontier analysis results indicated that a unit increase in the use of land, fertilizer, labour and herbicide contributed to wheat output by 0.577, 0.341, 0.078 and 0.174 respectively. The predicted technical, allocative and economic efficiencies were 0.76, 0.32 and 0.24 respectively. This implies that wheat farmers were not fully efficient and output could have been increased by 24% and about 68% of cost would have been saved. Furthermore, tobit regression results revealed that age of the farmers positively affected technical (0.0012, p<0.10), allocative (0.0025, p<0.05) and economic (0.0023, p<0.01) efficiencies of wheat farmers’ production in the study area. The sex of the wheat farmers was significant (0.0472, p<0.05) and positively affecting wheat farmers technical efficiency. Education of the wheat farmers significantly (p<0.10) and negatively affected their technical (-0.0021) inefficiencies, access to extension service was influencing both technical (- 0.0223, p<0.10) and economic (- 0.0789, p<0.10) inefficiencies negatively. The study concluded that wheat farmers were not fully efficient and more output (24%) could be achieved with the same level of inputs as indicated by the increasing return to scale of 1.197. The study therefore, recommended that concerted efforts should be made towards training farmers on appropriate inputs combination by extension agents to   improve  and boost wheat production in the study area.