Performance of Farm Business School (Fbs): A Case Study of Cocoa Farmers in Nigeria

The study empirically examined the performance of farm business school among cocoa farmers in Nigeria. Primary data were used for this study. The data were collected with the aid of structured questionnaire and 300 respondents were randomly selected through a multistage sampling technique. Descriptive statistics, budgetary techniques and multiple regression were employed to analyze the data. The results showed that the average age was about 54 years and the enterprise is male dominated. About 93.4% and 91.9% were married with nearly 91.7% and 89.7% had at least primary school education for the FBS participants and non-participants, respectively. The average household size was about 8 persons for both groups. Despite that there are no significant differences in the socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers, FBS participants made more benefits than the non-participants in the area. The profit of the FBS participants (N616,297.53) is greater than that of the non-participants (N41,616.08) while the return on investment of FBS participants (2.48) was far more than double of the non-participants. The determinant factors of the FBS participants are age, education, experience, application of agrochemicals and utilization of credit while variables such as age, education, household size and labour cost significantly influence profit of the non-participants in the area. Based on these findings, it can be recommended that monetary policies should be made to encourage lending institutions to administer loans to cocoa farmers in FBS at a lower interest rate as well as the timely release of funds. This will encourage more farmers to participate in the FBS and also help in reducing cost on major agricultural inputs. Keywords: Cocoa, Farm Business School, Participants, Profitability, Socioeconomic, Nigeria