This study assessed economics of groundnut production among smallholder farmers in Michika local government area of Adamawa State, Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique which involves purposive selection of Michika and simple random selection of farmers from eight wards was embraced in collecting primary data from 172 farmers using structured questionnaire. The analytical tools used were mainly descriptive, gross margin and regression analysis. The analysis found that groundnut production is profitable with an average gross margin of N97,477.80, total revenue of N167,160, and net farm income of N 94,540.64 per hectare. The regression analysis indicated that Cobb-Douglas production function gave the best fit with R 2 value of 0.748, implying that the specified factor inputs in the regression equation explained up to 74.8% of the variation in groundnut output and only 25.2% was accounted for by the random error term. Production inputs such as farm size, labour, agrochemicals, seeds and farming experience were statistically significant at varying levels of probability. This means that any increase in such inputs would bring about increase in groundnut output. Resource use efficiency analyses indicate that the ratios of MVP and MFC in respect to seeds, labour and Agrochemicals were greater than unity and hence were under-utilized by the farmers during production period. Therefore, policies aimed at assigning more production inputs to farmers should be introduce by government in order to enhance farmers' output and profitability.

Abstract:The study applies descriptive analysis, Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) of efficiency model and fractional regression model to data collected in 2016 using cross-sectional survey of maize producers in Nigeria. The purpose was to determine the impact of microfinance on the technical efficiency of maize producers and evaluates factors that influence inefficiency among credit beneficiaries and non-credit beneficiaries. Results show that the respective mean technical efficiency of credit beneficiaries and non-credit beneficiaries were 79 and 69%, which is far from the frontier technology. This means that technical efficiency can be improve by 21 and 31% respectively, with the same set of inputs. Slacks analysis shows that in order to attain optimum efficiency, credit beneficiaries should reduce fertilizer usage by 32.34%, seeds by 6.03%, labour by 7.79% and agrochemicals by 2.44% per hectare. Similarly, noncredit beneficiaries should reduce the usage of fertilizer slacks by about 19.48%, seeds by 2.73%, labour by 2.54% and agrochemicals slacks by 1.76% per hectare. Microfinance credit, household size, years of farming experience and education increases efficiency, while drought and age declines efficiency. Findings are useful to the farmers as appropriate input reduction for inefficient farms can be set to enable them attain optimum efficiency level. Maize producers should be encouraged to collect microfinance loan in order to increase their scale of operations and government in collaboration with research institutes should educate farmers on the actual input quantities to apply. This could help to reduce production costs, increase the farmers' efficiency and provide maize to consumers at an affordable rate.

This study analyzed the structure of onion marketing in Yola North Local Government Area of Adamawa State, Nigeria. Data were collected from Jimeta Modern market, Old market and Yola by-pass market based on the existing sampling frame. Descriptive statistics, Gini index and Marketing efficiency were the analytical tools employed. The results revealed that majority (92.5%) of the respondents were male, 62.5% were married with an average family size of 4 persons per household and 52.5% had some level of formal education with a mean marketing experience of 10 years. The average sales recorded per month for wholesalers and retailers were N2,888,000.00 and N372,237.50 respectively, while their respective net incomes per month were N234,610.00 and N35,743.73 respectively. The value of Gini coefficient for wholesalers and retailers were 0.47 and 0.52 respectively, an indication of inequality in earnings among the marketers due to high market concentration resulting to poor market structure. The results further revealed that onion marketing is inefficient in the study area with marketing efficiency scores of 8.82% and 10.62% for wholesalers and retailers respectively. The Return on Investment (ROI) for wholesalers and retailers were N0.081 and N0.096 respectively with retailers having relatively higher ROI. Lack of credit facilities (80%), high cost of transportation (73%) and security challenges (42.5%) were identified as the major problems affecting onion marketers in the area. The study recommends that government should expand its anchor borrower scheme program to include marketers in order to enable them expand their business and improve marketing efficiency.

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The cloud data center consumes massively more and more energy which is considered inacceptable. Therefore further efforts are needed to improve the energy efficiency of such data centers by using Server Consolidation to minimize the number of Active Physical Machines (APMs) in a data center setting. Strategies for positioning and transformation of VM maintain their usefulness as a roadmap to maximum consolidation. The latest techniques do complex restructuring, thus optimizing VM's positioning. The paper provides a detailed state-of -the-art strategies for VM positioning and consolidation that help improve energy efficiency in cloud data centers. A comparison is provided here between the strategies that revealed the worthiness, limitations and suggestions of strengthening other methods along the way.