ABSTRACT
Nigeria as a nation can't meet its homegrown necessities for vegetables, fruits, horticulture, spices and flavors, dried nuts and pulses. This study was carried out with the main aim of evaluating technical efficiency of vegetable production among farmers in Ovia North East. This study evaluated the Economics of Vegetable Production in Ovia North East Local Government, Edo State. The study specifically described the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents in the study area, determine cost and returns in vegetable production, estimate farmer’s technical efficiency and examine their constraint associated with vegetable production. A total of 100 vegetable farmers were randomly selected for the survey using a well-structured questionnaire. Ovia North East Local Government Area was purposively chosen for the survey because of the distance and the weather in the area was conducive for the production of vegetable. A random selection of five villages from Ovia North East was done. The sample frame was drawn from vegetable farmers in Ovia North East. Descriptive statistics, gross margin analysis model, the stochastic production frontier model and Five point Likert scale was used to analyse the data collected from the farmers.
Results show that technical efficiency of the farmers was concentrated at the efficiency class of 90 – 100 where 100% of the farmers fall into this category. The mean technical efficiency was 99.6%. The Total variable cost for vegetable production in Ovia North East was N90,330.235 per hectare. Among the variable costs, land recorded the highest cost of N67,900 representing 75.17% of the total cost of production, followed by seed with a cost of N11,216.5 representing 12.42% of the cost of production. The gross margin computation shows a value of N38, 044.765 per hectare. The return to naira invested was found to be 0.1407. This is not encouraging.
The study concluded that vegetable production is high in Ovia North East. From the findings of this study, it was recommended that effort should be made by Government authorities to provide enough land to farmers to carry out farming operations.
