The prevailing economic conditions as a result of COVID-19, climate change, and the Russia–Ukraine conflict, have led to renewed global interest in the efficiency of the agricultural sector. As a result of this, we investigated the efficiencies of 64 broiler producers in three districts covering the North West and Limpopo provinces in South Africa from 2019 to 2022, using a two-stage data envelopment analysis method with input orientation. The results show that producers operate on the upper bounds toward efficiency, but room for improvement still exists at 10%, 20%, and 28% on technical, allocative, and cost efficiencies. This indicates that inputs can still be reduced without changing the level of output and that the input combination is incompatible with cost minimization. Consequently, only 13%, 8%, and 4% of the sampled broiler producers exhibited technical, allocative, and cost efficiencies, respectively; the majority were women. The Vhembe, Capricorn, and Dr. Kenneth Kaunda (DRKK) districts had vastly different scores for each efficiency type, indicating that their differences in resource endowments, technology, and climate, necessitate the formulation of district-specific policies. The mortality rate, heating costs, and investments in health emerged as significant efficiency determinants. Overall, the findings provide insights into refocusing the country’s poultry sector in light of current shocks and the notable aspirations of the poultry master plan.

Beef cattle and poultry are critically important livestock for improving household food security and alleviating poverty amongst smallholder farmers in South Africa. In this paper, our goal is to examine the relationships between farmer psychological profiles and farm business performance of commercially oriented beef cattle and poultry smallholder farmers in South Africa. We employ a multipronged interdisciplinary approach to test the theory of planned behaviour and its relationship to farm business performance. First, a behavioural science-informed survey instrument was employed to collect data from randomly selected farmer participants in two major beef and poultry projects undertaken by the authors. Second, a latent profile analysis was used to identify the psychological profiles of those farmers. Third, traditional and estimated indicators of farm business performance were obtained using descriptive and econometric-based approaches, including logistic regression and stochastic frontier analyses. The estimated farm business performance indicators were correlated with the psychological profiles of farmers. Results from the latent profile analysis showed three distinct profiles of beef and poultry farmers clearly differentiated by their ability to control and succeed in their farm business enterprises; criteria included attitude, openness to ideas, personality, perceived capabilities, self-efficacy, time orientation, and farm- and personal-related concerns. Profile 1 (‘Fatalists’) scored themselves negatively on their ability to control and succeed in their business enterprises. The majority of farmers were generally neutral about their ability to control and succeed in their businesses (Profile 2, ‘Traditionalists’), while a relatively small group of farmers were confident of their ability to succeed (Profile 3, ‘Entrepreneurs’). We found evidence of significant differences in farm business performance amongst the different profiles of farmers. As far as we can determine, this is the only study to have assessed farm business performance based on a differentiation of farmers’ psychological profiles. Our results provide a framework to further investigate whether particular types of on-farm interventions and training methods can be customised for different segments of farmers based on their preferred learning styles.