Linear Programming Approach to Combination of Food Crop Enterprises among Gender Fadama III Beneficiaries in Adamawa State, Nigeria

Abstract

Linear programming approach was used to analyse combination of food crop enterprises among gender in Fadama III beneficiaries in Adamawa State, Nigeria. Using multistage random sampling procedure, 278 respondents were selected. Analytical techniques used were simple descriptive statistics and Linear Programming techniques. Mean age for the male and female respondents were 40 and 41 years respectively. Respective mean farm sizes of the male and female respondents were 1.89 and 1.39 hectares. The result also reveals that 52% male respondents acquired their land through family inheritance and 42% through leaseholds while majority (85.3%) of the female respondents acquired their land through leaseholds. The acquisition of farm lands through inheritance favoured more male respondents (52%) than their female counterparts (11.6%). The implication of this is that gender disparity in terms of land acquisition was prevalent in the study area and this will limit the productivity of the female fadama crop farmers. Nine crop combination patterns or enterprises were identified to include sole maize, sole rice, sole sorghum, maize/rice, rice/sorghum, maize/sorghum, maize/rice/sorghum, maize/vegetables and maize/rice/vegetables. Theresult on the resource utilization pattern for male farmers showed that four of the resource constraints were fully utilized in arriving at the optimal solution. These are labour, agro-chemicals, inorganic fertilizer and seeds. The dual (shadow) prices of the fully utilized resources indicate the amount by which the objective function will increase if these inputs are increased by one unit. That is, total gross margin will increase by N369.32, N3384.95, N200.31 and N864.91 for one-man day increase in labour, one litre increase in agro-chemicals, one-kilogram increase in inorganic fertilizer and one kilogram increase in seed respectively. Similarly, for the female farmers, resource utilization pattern also showed three of the resource constraints were fully utilized in arriving at the optimal solution. These inputs are labour, agro-chemicals and inorganic fertilizer. This also means that total gross margin will increase by N65.57, N3671.84 and N279.27 for one-man day increase in labour, one litre increase in agro-chemicals and one kilogram increase in inorganic fertilizer respectively. The non fully utilized resources among the male farmers was land (452.72 ha) while the non fully utilized resources among the female farmers were land (183.83 ha) and seeds (1,016.02 kg), indicating that these resources were in-efficiently utilized by the male and female fadama crop farmers in the study area.The study recommended that a prototype combination of crop enterprises that emanated from the linear programming should be integrated into the extension education package of the male and female fadama farmers to enable them improve on their farm income.