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The study sought to investigate the farm record keeping behaviour among small-scale poultry farmers in the Ga East Municipality. Data was collected by the use of the simple random sampling technique. All the poultry farmers interviewed kept at least production and financial records. The chi-square test of independence showed that farm record keeping was independent of age, educational level, experience in poultry farming, farmer status, number of birds owned by respondents and respondents' membership of a farmer association. The reason why most of the farmers did not keep all the farm records was because they assert that those records were not beneficial to them. An award for the best farm record keeper must be instituted by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) in collaboration with other non-governmental agencies to help boost farmers' interest in keeping farm records.

A study was carried out in the Kwaebibrim District of the Eastern Region of Ghana to study the production practices and the profitability of palm oil production among small scale processors using focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews and participant observations. Three categories of processing equipment namely digester screw press combined, digester with separate hand operated hydraulic press and digester with separate hand operated screw press were found in the district with the latter constituting about 80% of the processing equipment used by the processors. The major activities involved in the processing of fruits into oil are removal of the fruit containing spikelets from the fresh fruit bunches, fruit loosening and storage, boiling and digestion of fruits and pressing and clarifying of the oil produced. Fruits are usually stored for a period ranging from one to four weeks before processing leading often to high levels of free fatty acids in the oil produced. Due to scarcity of firewood in the district, waste lorry tyres and mesocarp fibres are used in place of firewood generating a lot of smoke with serious health risk to processors and other mill workers and the environment. Constraints in the small scale processing industry include inaccessibility to remunerative market especially during the peak fruit production period of February to May, lack of credit and skills and knowledge in good processing practices. The financial appraisal of palm oil production shows that in the peak fruit production period of April-May, processors make a loss of 38% of every cedi in sale in their operations and that the production of palm oil can be a profitable venture only during the lean fruit production season (from September -December) when oil is relatively scarce. The study suggests that to improve the income of small scale processors, there is the need to help the processors change their practices through research but at the same time it also requires work to create entry into the existing value chains through policy (e.g. bye-laws).

This study was conducted to determine the efficiency of resource use in rice production with the Kpong Irrigation Project (KIP) as a case study. Seventy farmers were selected using the simple random sampling technique. The Cobb-Douglass production function was used to estimate the coefficients of the various variables analysed and MPP, MVP and allocative efficiency index were also used to estimate the efficiency of resource use in the study area. The regression results showed that the farmers were in the second stage of production, which is, decreasing returns to scale (using the elasticities). The results of the efficiency computation indicated that land (6.63), fertilizer (1.76) and seed (10.84) were being underutilized and labour (0.000036) and chemicals were being highly over utilized in the study area. The study recommends that KIP should embark on repair works on the roads, provide appropriate machinery services and desilting the drains.

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