Land Management Practices and Technical Efficiency of Food Crop Farmers in North Central Nigeria: A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Approach

The study examines the effect of Land Management practices on technical efficiency of food crop farmers in North Central Nigeria. Data for the study were collected with the aid of well-structured questionnaire from 345 food crop farmers, while data analyses were carried out using Data envelopment analysis and tobit regression. About 12.17% of the farmers were relatively technical efficient in their use of resources, with mean technical efficiency being 0.576. Return to scale reveals 6.67% of the farms to be operating under increasing return to scale, none under decreasing return to scale while 93.33% were found to be operating under constant return to scale. Slacks were reported in the use of such inputs as planting materials, quantity of manure, family and hired labour as well as quantity of agrochemicals. Factors that significantly reduced the technical inefficiency of farming households in the study area (P=.05) were education, age, farm size, crop diversification, practicing alley cropping, bush fallowing, cover cropping, crop rotation, mulching and inorganic fertilizer. The need to sensitize farmers on the importance of adopting soil enhancing technologies or enhance retention of soil fertility and introduce policies against land fragmentation since this would help reduce technical inefficiency were recommended.