To attain the food security target of the country, fostering farmers’ adoption of improved rice varieties will go a long way toward closing the lingering production deficit gap in Nigeria, and meeting up with the ever-increasing demand for rice consumption in the country. This study investigated the effect of the adoption of improved rice varieties on the production efficiencies of rice farmers in the north-central Nigeria. A multistage sampling technique was uses to select 387 rice farmers, which includes 201 upland and 186 lowland rice farmers in the study area. A stochastic frontier analytical model (SFA) was employed to estimate production efficiencies (technical, economic and allocative) for the rice farmers. Further, a multivariate regression analysis (MVA) was applied to determine the effect of adoption on the efficiency levels of the rice farmers. The exploratory analysis of the data revealed that the rice varieties available for adoption by the rice farmers in the study area is 10, but both upland and lowland rice farmers adopted more of two rice varieties (Faro-46 and Faro-52). From the SFA results, most of the rice farmers have mean technical, economic and allocative efficiencies of 0.7, 0.54 and 0.76 respectively. The SFA estimates also indicated that seed, herbicide, fertilizer, farm size and capital assets significantly affect the efficiency of upland rice farmers, while the efficiency of their lowland counterparts is influenced by seed, farm size capital and herbicide, amongst others. The MVA estimates also showed that the adoption rate of improved rice varieties, years of formal education, and farm-level factors made significant contributions to the efficiency levels of the rice farmers. Importantly, the levels of adoption of all rice varieties by farmers indeed influenced their technical and economic efficiency, while having no impact on their allocative efficiency. The study recommended that the government, research institutes and developmental agencies should promote easy access to improved rice varieties by farmers, as this can further drive sustained adoption. This can evidently help to achieve desirable yield and enhance the efficiency level of the rice farmers and boost food availability and achieve the zero-hunger target in the study area and Nigeria at large.

adoption; rice production; efficiency; stochastic frontier; multivariate; Nigeria

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