Sorghum farming group in South Africa is divided into the smallholder and business ranchers attributable to the distinctions in cultivar sizes, utility creation and production strategies. Sorghum is utilized primarily for sustenance and refreshments in Ga-Masemola (GM) town. Smallholder sorghum farmers in the town utilize some portion of their wage for recreation, goat and cows' compost are utilized as manures to enhance soil fruitfulness and increment sorghum yield, they rely upon precipitation water for the water system and they have no entrance to expansion administrations. The study distinguish and depict the socioeconomic characteristics of smallholder sorghum farmers in Ga-Masemola town; it looks at the causes of technical efficiency among smallholder sorghum ranchers in the town, and it recognizes and portrays difficulties confronted by smallholder sorghum farmers in the town. Essential information was gathered utilizing organized surveys and an example size of 48 smallholder sorghum farmers in the town was chosen. Cobb Douglas model was utilized to analyze the information or data gotten.The socioeconomic characteristics of smallholder sorghum farmers were:farming experience, age, sexual orientation, instructive level and family unit measure. The study indicates that the determinants of technical efficiency among smallholder sorghum farmers in Ga-Masemola town that were observed to be huge are the measure of land dedicated and the amount of seeds utilized. Farmers are confronting difficulties, for example, sicknesses, low capital, pests, separation to the homestead, absence of water and atmosphere (i.e. climate) changes.The study suggested and recommended that smallholder sorghum farmers in Ga-Masemola (GM) town require arable land to expand their production; they additionally require agriculture extension officers for training and spreading or disseminating information about inputs allocation. Besides, the smallholder farmers should be encouraged to utilize enhanced seeds varieties in order to expand their technical efficiency.

No abstract

No abstract

The intervention of government in the development of smallholder agriculture is still grappling and has not yielded the desired results, despite the huge investment from government. This has been a source of concern to government and policy makers. This paper sought to analyze the socio-demographic features of the smallholder maize farmers; profile the goals and aspirations of these farmers; and lastly, to analyze the technical efficiency of maize farmers. Qamata and Tyefu in the Transkei and Ciskei homelands, respectively were purposively chosen for the study. Descriptive statistics; Principal component analysis (PCA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) were used in the analysis. The result shows, that majority (66%) of the farmers were males with an average range of 61 years old. On the other hand, the PCA indicated that there is a variation between predicted goals and aspiration among maize farmers. The SFA result showed that farmers were efficient. The mean technical efficiency estimates up to 100%, an indication that farmers are more efficient in the usage of factors of production at their disposal in the study area. This implies that smallholder maize farming is lucrative due to its profit-making potentials. Moreover, this is a clear indication that more income and wealth is generated thereby implying that it is strategic and pivotal in improving farmers’ livelihoods