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Profitability and technical efficiency of leafy vegetable production: a stochastic frontier production function analysis

ABSTRACT Smallholder leafy vegetable farmers are often faced with resource-use inefficiency in production. This work examined the profitability and technical efficiency of leafy vegetable production to determine sources of inefficiencies in smallholder production. The Maximum Likelihood Estimates of the Stochastic frontier production function indicated factors positively influencing production gross margin were education level, experience, seed, labor costs, fertilizer and farm-size; farmer age negatively influenced results, especially those who have less contact with extension agents. The mean efficiency score was 0.804 with R2 of 0.912. With more education, the application of required inputs could improve the yield of leafy vegetables.