tailieunhanh - Productivity and Technical Efficiency of Poultry Egg Production in Nigeria

Let’s start with the question about hormones that Extension specialists and agents hear from the public. “Why do you add hormones into chicken feed?” The simple truth is hormones are not added to poultry feeds. This fallacy is fueled by inaccurate statements made by The World Health Organization that apparently has issued a plea to stop giving growth hormones to chickens grown for human consumption. Supposedly the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and other medical groups are in agreement even; however, the poultry industry does not feed hormones to their birds | International Journal of Poultry Science 2 6 459-464 2003 Asian Network for Scientific Information 2003 Productivity and Technical Efficiency of Poultry Egg Production in Nigeria . Ojo Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension Federal University of Technology . 704 Akure Nigeria Abstract The study examined the Productivity and Technical Efficiency of Poultry egg production in Nigeria using the stochastic frontier production function analysis. Primary data were collected using a set of structured questionnaire from two hundred poultry egg farmers who were selected using multi stage sampling techniques from five Local Government Areas LGA of Osun state Nigeria. Results showed that poultry egg production was in the rational stage of production stage II as depicted by the Returns to Scale RTS of . The variables of interest stock of birds operating costs and other costs were effectively allocated and used as confirmed by each variable having estimated coefficient value between zero and unity. The Technical Efficiencies of the farmers varied widely between and with a mean of and about seventy nine percent of the farmers had . exceeding . This study further observed that only location of farm nearness to urban centre positively affected while increase in the other socio-economic variables age experience and education led to decrease in . Key words Productivity technical efficiency stochastic frontier production Nigeria Introduction In Nigeria the production of food has not increased at the rate that can meet the increasing population. While food production increases at the rate of . Food demand increases at a rate of more than due to the high rate of population growth of FOS 1996 . The apparent disparity between the rate of food production and demand for food in Nigeria has led to i a food demand supply gap thus leading to a widening gap between domestic food and total food requirement ii an increasing .