Kihamba, G. Z. (presumably March 2019): Optimal farm enterprise mix and threshold dietary requirements for smallholder farmers in semi-arid Chamwino district, Dodoma-Tanzania

Master Theses

Malnutrition is among serious health problems affecting infants, children and women of reproductive age in Tanzania. Various approaches have been adopted to address this problem, such approaches include; importation of food, food aid and medical treatment. However; despite this approaches made, millions of Tanzanians continue to suffer from one or more forms of malnutrition. The agriculture has currently taken as great measure to harness malnutrition among developing countries including Tanzania, whereas recently new attention has been given to the role of agriculture in nutrition and malnutrition. Thus; the present study conducted to determine an optimum farm enterprise mix that uses available resources to maximize profit while ensuring adequate supply of food to meet household’s nutritional requirement. The study used a cross sectional data from 300 household farmers from two villages of Chamwino district, using static linear programming (LP) as the analytical technique it was found that, for household’s farmer to maximize the overall optimal profit in the year while meeting adequate household food needs, 2.40 acres of millet, 0.75 acres of sunflower, 3.65 acres of groundnuts and at least 16 number of poultry were to be produced in order to attain global optimal solution of 1 383 878TZS. Moreover, some of the constraints satisfied the objective function in the model, meaning that it was possible for smallholder farmers to look for more resources to produce enterprise beyond the optimal profit since any increase of the unit resources could improve the objective function by certain value of the shadow price. It was concluded that, with current average farm production most of the farming population was unable to satisfy their household food needs from the farm production and therefore, the study recommend for optimal utilization of resources for optimal production using potential resources combinations available to meet minimal food security and nutrition requirements while generating a certain level of income.

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