Determinants Influencing Market Outlet Choices Among Smallholder Dairy Farmers in a Developing Economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dairy farming is an important livelihood source for most smallholder farmers in Kenya. However, most smallholder dairy farmers in Kenya face various challenges in selecting profitable market outlets, and their choices are influenced by various factors. Understanding these determinants is crucial, as market outlet decisions directly impact farmers’ income, livelihoods, and the overall growth of their agrienterprises. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the determinants influencing market outlet choices among smallholder farmers in Kenya specifically Narok County which is an emerging dairy hub in the country. In this context, this study analyses the determinants influencing market outlet choices (Farm gate, Milk bars, Traders, Cooperatives, and Processors among smallholder dairy farmers in Narok County, Kenya using a multivariate probit model. Data was collected using a multi-stage sampling procedure from the 384 smallholder dairy farmers. Some of the key factors that shape smallholder dairy farmers’ milk market choices, based on the results of the study include household head occupation, farm size, production cycles, milk volumes, market distance, and group membership. Policy interventions should aim to strengthen cooperative structures, support group memberships, invest in transport infrastructure to mitigate distance barriers, encourage prompt payment systems, and enhance market information access to support sustainable participation of smallholder dairy farmers in diverse market channels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".