Farm location and determinants of agricultural productivity in the Oke-Ogun Area of Oyo State, Nigeria.

Abstract

This exploratory study empirically assesses the effects of farm location on food farmer’s technical efficiency. The study was carried out in the Oke Ogun Area of Oyo State. Three Local Government Areas (LGAs) were purposively selected and a multistage random sampling technique was used to collect data from 240 food farmers. Descriptive and inferential statistics were adopted to analyse data and a Stochastic Production Frontier Approach was used to estimate farmer’s technical efficiency and its socio-economic determinants. The results show that the majority of farmers traveled an average of 6 km between the farm location and the village and resided mostly in the village. Food producers were full-time farmers practicing mostly crop diversification and exploiting an average of 14.61 acres of land. The technical efficiency scores recorded varied between 0.2 and 0.94 with a mean of 0.73. There is a significant effect of the farm distance, farmers ’ place of residence, farmer’s gender, experience, extension contact, access to credit, and rate of lands to tubers and fertilizer use on food farmers’ technical efficiency. Meanwhile, the level of involvement into farming (full-time or part-time), the diversification index, and farm size had no significant effect on farmer’s productivity. The study 2 suggests no negative impact of farm distance on food farmer’s productivity while highlighting the strategic importance of credit and extension services towards female food farmers.