Marketing challenges and opportunities faced by the Nguni cattle project beneficiaries in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 114

extent that school children walk very long distances to schools. This results in most of the
people in the area not going to school.
Distances that farmers travel when selling their cattle is significantly associated with
municipality ( P <0.05). This can be explained by location of active cattle markets in
the three municipalities. While in Amatole, active cattle markets (major towns in the
municipality) are far from the sampled communities, for Chris Hani and Alfred Nzo
District Municipalities the bulk of the surveyed communities are close to major towns.
Chris Hani Municipality provides market infrastructure to small scale farmers in most of
the communities as opposed to Amatole that provides little or no marketing infrastructure.
The result of this is that farmers in Amatole District sell their cattle in more distant markets
since buyers are unable to access the farmsteads due to absence of good quality marketing
infrastructure. According to Montshwe (2006), distance to market can be reduced by
bringing buyers closer to small scale farmers. Condition of cattle significantly varies across
municipalities ( P <0.05). This is due to the fact that rainfall and soil fertility, which play an
important role in determining animal condition, differ from one municipality to the other.
In Alfred Nzo, the body condition of cattle was poor compared to Amatole probably due
to poor condition of grazing lands, low rainfall, snow and poor soils.
There is an association between municipality and herd size ( P <0.05). Different
municipalities have different agro-ecological conditions and this leads to variations in
herd sizes since other places are more conducive to cattle farming than others. Mean herd
size difference for Alfred Nzo significantly differs from that of Amatole and Chris Hani
(Table 6.3). This may be due to extreme climatic conditions and high levels of stock theft
experienced in Alfred Nzo.
6.7 Results of the logistic regression
Out of the thirteen variables included in the model, five were significant ( P <0.05) and these
are market availability, transport availability, body condition of cattle, information access
and gender of household head as shown in Table 6.4. In this section all the variables are
discussed in general and to what extent they conform to priori expectations.
6.7.1 Availability of markets
Market availability significantly affects cattle sales positively, ceteris paribus . This positive
and significant relationship was expected. These results corroborate those of Nkhori (2004)
and Montshwe (2006). As market becomes more available and accessible to farmers, the
more the market would offer farmers better and more competitive prices. Good price will
result in farmer being willing to sell since rational people want good offers and this will
in turn increase cattle sales. As expected, the results suggest that those households that