Author
Listed:
- Dyer, Martin
- Mills, Richard
- Conradie, Beatrice
- Piesse, Jenifer
Abstract
This study investigates the efficiency of urban micro-farms in two Cape Town townships, Nyanga and Khayelitsha, and their contribution to livelihoods and food security. The Harvest of Hope programme provides credit, access to inputs and an outlet for organic vegetables. Comprehensive data on inputs are limited and in this study only land, labour, seeds and seedlings, compost and farmer experience are included. Non-parametric models are used to generate individual efficiency measures relative to best practice. The results revealed an average level of overall, technical and scale efficiency of 72.4%, 79.7% and 90.6%, respectively. Overall efficiency was negatively correlated with land holdings and the use of compost and seedlings. This is supported by the finding that the nine best-practice farms were characterised by a smaller scale of production, indicating that efficiency losses are experienced as greater quantities of inputs are used. In terms of area differences, Nyanga farms exhibit significantly higher technical efficiency, whereas farms in Khayelitsha are more scale efficient. Expenditure on compost and seed added value, although mulching or operator experience did not increase output substantially. The latter can be explained by the highly effective training programme provided that makes prior experience unnecessary to achieve good practice. Fully efficient farms are R2 600 per plot more profitable than inefficient farms, while farms that need a windbreak earn R700 less per plot per season than more sheltered operations. These results are the first of their kind for South Africa and lay the foundation for more effective extension to the sector.
Suggested Citation
Dyer, Martin & Mills, Richard & Conradie, Beatrice & Piesse, Jenifer, 2016.
"Harvest of Hope: The Contribution of Peri-Urban Agriculture in South African Townships,"
Agrekon, Agricultural Economics Association of South Africa (AEASA), vol. 54(4), March.
Handle:
RePEc:ags:agreko:346849
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.346849
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:agreko:346849. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeasaea.html .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.