Determinants of technical efficiency in duck production in southwest Nigeria

The need to complement the supply of animal products with other sources of poultry necessitates exploring the potentials of domestic duck production. Studies conducted on indigenous ducks in Nigeria have paid less attention to the resource requirements and its determinants to duck production. This study therefore estimated technical efficiencies of domestic duck producers in South-western Nigeria, and identified some socio-economic factors, which influence them. A combination of purposive and random sampling was employed. Stochastic frontier production function approach using a translog production function was used to estimate the technical efficiencies of indigenous duck producers, while inefficiency model was used to determine the socio-economic factors affecting the technical efficiencies. The results showed that the level of technical efficiency ranged from 48% to 96% with a mean of 83.3%, which suggests that average duck output was 16.7% short of the maximum possible level. This implies that productive efficiency could still be improved using the subsisting resource base. The study concluded that mounting capacity building programmes for duck farmers generally, and availability of credit could increase the productivity of duck enterprise if monitored.