for example farm labour may be easier to motivate and supervise while smallholders may have important local knowledge and may be more adept at managing some forms of risk on the other hand there are important economies of scale beyond the farm in areas such as procuring inputs obtaining information on markets and technical farming issues in meeting standards and certifying production and in transacting with large scale buyers from processors and supermarkets with their exacting demands wiggins small farms may be technically and allocatively efficient given the existing level of development but economies of scale beyond the farm gate are likely become more apparent as the economy develops in much of africa only a minority of farms produces a marketed surplus