Satisficing Behaviour Among Food Crop Farmers In Nigeria Implications For Farm Resource Use

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This paper worked on the assumption that food crop farmers in allocating their resources to food crop production seek to “satisfice” among multiple and conflicting goals rather than to maximize a single or multiple objectives.  It is hypothesized that the observed poor food-crop hectarage response to government policies and programmes may be as a result of this satisficing behaviour.  The study made use of 160 randomly selected Agricultural Development Project (ADP) food crop farmers from Oyo State in Nigeria and adopted the linear goal programming model to model their resource use and allocation behaviour.  The results of the study show that the low levels or resource endowment does not seem to impose severe limitations on the satisfaction of the average farmer’s food-crop-farm production goals.  This is largely because in most cases the goal aspiration levels were very low and highly restrictive.  The implication is that the average farmer is not under “severe internal” pressure to reallocate more of his personal and/or borrowed productive resources to the food-crop farm.  Thus policy efforts aimed at increasing food-crop farmers’ access to farm production resources for their food crop farms may have to be accompanied by programmes that will ensure the utilization of such additional resources on the food crop farms.