Congratulations to Dr. T. M. Orisasona for successfully defending his PhD thesis on: “Analysis of the Technical Efficiency and Profitability of Coffee Production in Kogi State, Nigeria” at the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension, Ambrose Alli University Ekpoma, Edo State on April 17, 2023. There have been a lot of research on efficiency of annual crops with little attention given to perennial crops such as coffee. Therefore, the objective of this study was to estimate the technical efficiency of the farming in the study area, determine the profitability of coffee production and identify the constraints face by coffee farmers. Multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select the respondent for the study. The first stage was the purposive selection of three Local Government Areas (LGAs) from the State. Second stage was the random selection of 15 coffee producing communities from the three selected LGAs (the selection was proportionate to size), while the third stage was the random selection of 400 coffee farming households from the selected communities. Data were collected with the use of well-structured questionnaire for the literate respondents and an interview schedule for the illiterate respondents. The Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data collected: Gross Margin (GM) and Net Revenue (NR) to analyse the profitability of the coffee farming and Stochastic production function frontier model (SPFF) was used to estimate technical efficiency. Results revealed that 24.8 % of the farmers in the study area have the age of their household within the range of between 60 and 70 years. Majority (77.8%) were males. 22.2% were females while 85% were married.
Most (65%) of the farmers were educated far beyond primary school with 55.5% of the farmers having family size of between 4 and 7 persons. About 30.5% of the respondents had between 21 and 30 years of the farming experience in coffee production.
The results showed that production of coffee as a venture is profitable because for every ₦1 invested in the business, it yielded ₦1.39. The results of technical efficiency were obtained using stochastic production function frontier (SPFF) model. The results showed that there was high efficiency in the production of coffee in the study area and farmers are efficient for half-normal and truncated normal distribution. The mean range of technical efficiency was about 74%. Econometric results obtained from frontier model indicate that labour, volume of chemical used and seed quantity has significant level of significance and positive sign.
Thus, the results suggest that there need to be policies geared towards enhancing production efficiency of farmers so as to enhance their commodity productivity. The study also recommended that government should support expanded production of coffee to other potential areas by taking further research on cost and benefit analysis of increasing coffee production. The government and other lending agencies should also do more in assisting the respondents with loans in order to reduce the problem of inadequate capital among the farmers. The study provides current information on the technical efficiency of coffee production in Nigeria and positively motivate youth in accepting coffee farming as a business like any others works of life.