Preferences for Sustainable Agriculture Attributes and Technical Efficiency among Family Maize Farmers in Lufwanyama District, Zambia

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between farmer preferences for attributes of sustainable agricultural practices and their technical efficiency, in order to inform and improve policy targeting and programme packaging with regard to promoting adoption of the said sustainable agricultural practices. Farmer preferences for the attributes of eleven sustainable agricultural practices were elicited in a best-worst experiment from a random sample of one hundred and sixty-three family farmers. Their responses were analysed to determine preferences using the best-worst scaling approach. An assessment of preference heterogeneity was made using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Additionally, using the stochastic frontier approach, maize production input and output data were collected and analysed to estimate the farmers’ technical efficiency. Finally, the relationship between the technical efficiency scores and cluster group membership was investigated, using t-tests and the analysis-of-variance method. The best-worst scaling results ranked eleven attributes in order of the most preferred to the least preferred. They ranked as follows: increased crop yield; decrease in pests and diseases; increase in drought resistance; increased soil fertility; decreased production costs; decreased on-farm soil erosion; decrease in external inputs used; decreased water requirements; decreased labour use and decreased off-farm pollution as well as a reduction in extension requirements. Cluster analysis gave rise to five preference clusters: cost minimising; crop yield-maximizing; input-minimising, environmental-resilience-maximisers and the environmentally-conscious cluster. The mean technical efficiency of the sample was 50.9%. Efficiency was modelled on farmer contextual variables and cluster membership. The gender of the household head, practice of soil conservation and membership of the yield-maximising cluster were found to be significant in explaining efficiency. Relative to the environmental-resilience-maximizing cluster, the yield-maximizing cluster farmers were 9.8% more efficient. The result was suggestive of a relationship between farmer preferences and technical efficiency. However, an analysis of variance test between technical efficiency scores and cluster membership failed to reject the null hypothesis of equal mean efficiency across the clusters. Therefore, the data demonstrated no substantial relationship between the farmer preferences for sustainable agricultural practices and their technical efficiency.