There is a large literature on the estimation of frontier production functions, much of it applied to low-income agriculture. However, much of this literature largely ignores nature's role in agricultural production. Because exogenous, natural production conditions (e.g., rainfall, soil quality,...

This study was intended to identify factors affecting the technical efficiency of onion production by smallholder farmers in Dallo-Manna district of south eastern Ethiopia using cross-sectional data obtained from 183 randomly selected smallholder farmers. Both descriptive statistics and...

Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers...

This article analyses the technical efficiency of maize production in Zimbabwe's smallholder farming communities following the fast-track land reform of the year 2000 with a view of highlighting key entry points for policy. Using a randomly selected sample of 522 smallholder maize producers, a...

This study employed the Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production function to measure the level of technical efficiency among smallholder cassava farmers in Central Madagascar. A multi-stage random sampling technique was used to select 180 cassava farmers in the region and from this sample,...