Abstract

Kenya has been one of the world’s leading pineapple producers for many years and is currently ranked 9th internationally. The biggest source of fruit is at Del Monte’s farm in Thika, but small-scale growers are also increasing their production for the local market. However, in Bureti District there is a gap between the potential farm yield and the actual yield realized by the pineapple farmers. Thus, this study has examined questions on current farm level efficiency in small-scale pineapple production. A semi-structured and pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect data from small-scale pineapple farmers through face to face interviews. Multi-stage sampling method was employed to get a representative sample of 150 pineapple farmers. The study used stochastic production frontier, to estimate technical efficiencies of pineapple production among small-scale farmers in Bureti district. Results of the study indicated that the average technical efficiency of pineapple production was 0.69. This implies that given the level of technology and inputs, the output could be increased by 30.8% through better use of available resources thus farmers should be trained to enhance their capacity to efficiently use the available resources.

Keywords:

Pineapple production, stochastic frontier functions, technical efficiency,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.