ABSTRACT
The study examined the costs and returns of vegetable crops production in Delta State, Nigeria. The objectives were to describe the socio-economic characteristic of vegetable crops farmers, identify the major vegetable crops cultivated and the production system adopted in the study area, examine the effect of socio-economic factors on output of vegetable crops production, determine the structure of costs, returns and therefore profitability of vegetable crops production, examine the resource use efficiency of vegetable crops production, and identify constraints of vegetable crops production in the study area. In order to realize the objectives of the study, primary data were generated with the aid of structured questionnaire that were administered to three hundred and sixty (360) respondents drawn through multiple stage sampling (procedure). However owing to non – response and inadequate information only three hundred (300) responses were used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics, such as mean and mode, gross margin, multiple regression model, marginal value productivity (MVP) and marginal factor cost (MFC) and a five point likert scale were used to analyze the data. Findings revealed that more than 82% of the farmers have their age below 60 years of age while 89.3% had formal education, with a mean family size of 6 person per household. About 62.4% of the respondents had 3 – 6 years of farming experience, while 84% had farm size ranging between 0.1 – 0.6 hectare. Vegetable crops production is profitable on average to the tune of N155,500/ hectare with a net return to total cost ratio of 0.64. Although the study revealed that vegetable production was profitable, factors such as equipment, transportation cost, and climatic event were identified as major constraints to vegetable crops production in the study area. Estimate of allocative efficiency of resources showed that farmers were inefficient in resource utilization; while land was under-utilized, planting material, fertilizer and labour were over utilized. It was recommended that adequate credit should be made available to farmers so as to enable them to procure critical farm input and there is need for training on vegetable crops farming, to enable farmers expand output and improve their standard of living.
