Improving livelihoods of smallholder farmers through region specific strategies: a case study of South African sheep production

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates if two groups of smallholder sheep farmers who farm using communal grazing land in the N8 development corridor of South Africa can be treated in a homogenous manner. Heterogeneous production environments should result in different production responses, which are unique to the production region. A better understanding of these unique responses could guide the development of improved strategies to increase smallholder livestock production in South Africa. A stochastic production frontier approach was used to evaluate two production districts before grouping the data and estimating the metafrontier. The metafrontier represents a homogenous benchmark for all producers. Results indicate that the two districts cannot be treated the same. Therefore a single production function and strategy cannot be used to improve productivity and efficiency of livestock production in both the districts. The conclusion is that the development of strategies to increase smallholder sheep producers, productivity and efficiency requires an understanding of the production, environmental and institutional factors that the farmers experience within that particular district. Considering the study areas used in the paper, attention to the more technical aspects of production and management can improve the farmers' productivity and efficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Sheep production
• stochastic metafrontier
• technical efficiency
• heterogeneous production environments

JEL CODES:

• c12
• c14
• c15
• o4

View correction statement:

Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yong Sebastian Nyam http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7175-2873

Nicolette Matthews http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8975-9026

Yonas Tesfamariam Bahta http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3782-5597

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03031853.2020.1728996)

Notes

1 1US$ = ZAR 13.12.

2 Labour (man-days) is used during the estimation of the stochastic production function to determine the relationship between labour used and the level of sheep output produced. Household size is included within the inefficiency model since it is expected that the size of the household can affect the level of efficiency. Whenever labour is provided by predominately household members, efficiency levels typically decrease when households are large (Mariano et al., 2010 and Otieno, Hubbard, and Ruto 2012).

3 $LR=-2\left[L\left(H0\right)-L\left(Ha\right)\right]$, where $L\left(H0\right)$ and $L\left(Ha\right)$ are the relevant log-likelihood values, and $L\left(Ha\right)=L\left(Botshabelo\right)+L\left(ThabaNchu\right)$. See Rao, O’Donnell, and Battese (2003) and Villano, Boshrabadi, and Fleming (2010).