Abstract
Market participation among beef cattle farmers is key to ensuring better income, food security, and sustainable beef supply. Farmers in the traditional beef cattle sector, nevertheless, are well known for their low market participation. This study, thus, sought to examine factors that influenced market participation among beef cattle farmers in the Meatu district of Simiyu region, Tanzania. The study randomly selected a sample size of 393 farmers. The cross-sectional data collected through interviews and questionnaires were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. The descriptive analyses showed that the average age of the interviewees was 53.73 years with a family size of 13.11. On average, the respondents had about 24.14 years of farming experience. Most of the respondents (67.9%) had primary education. Among the respondents, about 61.3%, 4.6%, and 32.6% had access to market information, farm credits, and veterinary services, respectively. The average cattle herd size was 53.46 heads. About 90.1% of farmers had participated in the markets by selling an average of 5 heads each, per year. This study has revealed low volume of sales, low education levels, and poor access to credits and veterinary services as the major factors that limit market participation. Furthermore, econometric results show that the key factors that significantly influenced farmers to increase the volume of beef cattle sales in the market at P < 0.05 included price, herd size, off-farm income, distance to market, age of the farmer, and cattle fattening. Moreover, membership in cooperatives, access to market information, and farming experience also had significant influence at P < 0.05. This study recommends establishment of strategic cooperatives to function not only as a communication channel for farm credits, price, market information, and training on commercial farming, but also to assist farmers in selection of profitable markets.
Highlights
This indicates that the majority of beef cattle farmers are dependent on Variables Age of a farmer Household size Beef cattle herd size Farming experience Off-farm income(US$) Grazing land owned Cows owned Bulls owned Steers-Oxen owned Heifers owned
The average age of market and non-market participants was 54.52 and 46.56 years, respectively. This indicates that both market and non-market participants were in the active age of the labour force, which is important in the adoption of beef cattle production technologies and a willingness to engage in beef cattle marketing
These results indicate that the larger the beef cattle herd size, the more the beef cattle farmers’ motivation to participate in the markets
Summary
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis,decision to publish,or preparation of the manuscript
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