Farm size effect on rice production in the office of Niger in Mali

This study aims to determine the effect of farm size on rice production from collected data from 105 rice producers in the Office of Niger zone. The augmented Cobb Douglass production function was used to estimate effects of the rice farm size and socio-economic characteristics of farmers on the rice farm production.
The results show a high level of correlation between the farm size and rice production in the study area. The coefficient of determination (R2) is found to be 82.21%. This shows that the farm size alone is explaining up to 82,21% of the rice production in the Office of Niger area. The overall F test indicates that the used model explains about 64% expected result at 1% significant level. The sum of variables' coefficients is 0.89 which is less than 1.
This result means that rice farmers in ON zone are working at decreasing rate of scale meaning that if all production factors (farm size and labor) are increased by 1%, total production will increase by 0.89%.