PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF POULTRY EGG PRODUCTION IN ONDO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study was carried out to quantitatively analyze and evaluate the performance of poultry egg production in Ondo State, Nigeria. It specifically identified the socio-economic characteristics of respondents, determine the profitability level of poultry egg production, examined their technical efficiency and identified the constraints militating against poultry egg production in the study area. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select one hundred and twenty (120) poultry egg farmers from three local government areas in Ondo State. Descriptive statistics, budgeting analysis and stochastic frontier production function were used to analyze the data. The frequency of occurrences of the predicted farm specific technical efficiencies ranged between 0.382 and 0.976 with a mean efficiency of 0.87. The decile range of technical efficiency analysis revealed that 80% of the farmers had technical efficiency of 0.81 and above, meaning that the sampled farms were relatively technically efficient and more than half of the farmers obtained maximum output from a given set of inputs with a reduced level of resources wastage. In addition, the study showed that the coefficient of gender was negative (-0.334), reduced technical inefficiency but increased technical efficiency of the poultry egg farmers in the study area. The coefficients of feed, family labour number of birds, years of schooling, farming experience, farm type, stocking stage and cooperative membership were all positive and statistically significant at 5%level when tested with standard error, that is, 0.392, 0.266, 0.112, 0.032, 0.277, 0.298, and 0.794 respectively. Thus, these variables increased the technical inefficiency and reduced the technical efficiency of the farmers in the study area. The implication of these findings was that variations in the output of egg farmers in the study area could be attributed to technical inefficiency effects in the farmer’s production process. Concerted effort should be made to reduce the sources of the technical inefficiency effects. The result of the computed RTS (return to scale) was 0.642,indicating that egg production in the study area was in stage II of the production surface and that egg production in the study area was in stage of efficient production and utilization of resources. The study showed that poultry egg production was profitable in Ondo State judging by the positive mean value of the Net Profit of N1,345,875 with a standard deviation of N655,841.875, The study concluded that the result of the stochastic frontier production function analysis showed that the elasticity of production of {feed, family labour and number of birds} used in the analysis had positive coefficients), were in stage II, meaning poultry farmers were efficient in the allocation and utilization of their resources while that of age, hired labour, depreciation cost and operating expenses had negative sign and were already in stage III of the production surface, They were being overused in the production process and therefore reduced output from egg production. In order to ensure increased egg production from the factors of production, the usage of hired labour, operating expenses and depreciation cost must be reduced so that it can come back to stage II (the stage of efficient factor usage), indicating that variables with positive elasticity of production increased egg output while those with negative elasticity of production decreased egg output. The result of the analysis also indicated that there was presence of technical inefficiency effects in egg production in the study area. The coefficient of each variable used in the analysis was less than unity but greater than zero which showed that elasticity of production is between zero and unity that is (0<Ep<1).