RESOURCE UTILIZATION AMONG COCOA FARMERS IN EDO STATE, NIGERIA

Cocoa farmers in Edo State are mainly smallholders, usually with large household sizes and limited resource availability. These farmers are faced with the problem of how best their enterprises can be combined on available land and other production inputs to meet their needs. The study was thus designed to identify the level of utilization of production resources by cocoa farmers in Edo State, with the aim of identifying the best combination of resource utilization in cocoa production systems that would adequately meet the farming households’ need for food and income on a sustainable basis. A combination of purposive and simple random selection techniques was adopted in obtaining the 171 cocoa farmers for the study. Descriptive statistics and Linear Programming were employed in analyzing the data. Results showed that the average farm size of cocoa farmers in the study area was 2.97 hectares while the average annual cost of lease per hectare of farmland was found to be N12,090.21. The linear programming analysis showed that four enterprise combinations selected from the identified 79, on the basis of frequency, over-utilized labour and insecticides. However, the combination of cocoa with plantain, kolanut and oilpalm did not over-utilize labour and insecticides. Fertilizer was under-utilized in sole cocoa enterprise. The study therefore concluded that the combination of cocoa with plantain as food crop and tree crops such as oil palm and kolanut would give better yield/economic returns.