Modeling the impact of drought on smallholder cattle holdings

The quest to quantify the effect of drought on smallholder cattle herd decline has been attempted in published studies, which mostly resort to mean comparison of livestock data. Empirical study that incorporates the influence of time and farmer specific factors on smallholder cattle herd in drought research is largely unknown. The contribution of this study is to model the impact of drought on smallholder cattle herd size using a five-period panel from 2008 to 2017 in South Africa. It is recorded that South Africa experienced a severe drought between 2015 and 2016. The feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) technique used in this study corrects for heteroskedasticity and cross-sectional correlation in other to yield efficient estimates. Contemporaneous effect of drought on cattle herd size was found to be negative and significant. Other factors such as off-farm income, gender, household access to veterinary services, secondary off-farm income, land ownership and household size had significant effect on herd size.