Socioeconomic Determinants of Small Ruminant Livestock Production Decision in Kacha Birra District, Kambata Tambaro Zone, in Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the socio-economic determinants of small ruminant livestock production decisions in the Kacha birra district. The study used a multistage sampling (three-stage sampling) procedure to select districts, kebele, and households through purposive, simple random sampling and proportional sampling techniques based on agroecology of the districts respectively. The study used well-structured questionnaires and interviews to collect necessary data from 297 households. The selected data were analyzed in a form of descriptive, inferential, and econometrics analysis methods. The study employed multinomial logistic regression and negative binomial regression model to analyze socio-economic determinants of a small ruminant livestock production decision and to express the expected probability of decision of farmers affected by various socio-economic, demographic, and institutional factors respectively. The result of descriptive statistics indicated that sheep production is dominant in study area 130 (43.77%), 102 (34.34%) decided to alone goat and 65 (21.89%) of smallholder farmers both sheep and goat. The multinomial logistic regression model result shows that Socioeconomic factors like; the number of livestock owned, cultivated land size, policy factors (access of having a credit service and access to extension contact service), access to off-farm income, the experience of small ruminant livestock production affect and family size positively affects the decision of farmers whereas, marital status of the respondent, agroecology, and religion of respondents negatively affect the farmer's decision of small ruminant livestock production at 1% and 5% significance level. The result of the Negative Binomial regression model shows that family size, extension service, agroecology, and the total number of livestock significantly affect the decision of the expected values of householders' small ruminant livestock production. Lastly, the study recommends policy factors (access of extension contact service and access of formal credit services) should be strengthened in a study area to increase smallholder farmers' small ruminant livestock productivity.