Extensive beef cattle production in Botswana is carried out on diverse pastoral zones; ranging
from the sandveld vegetation of the Kalahari Desert with low rainfall in the west to the
hardveld vegetation with nutritious grassland and better rainfall in the east. Using a stochastic
frontier models, a panel data of 26 agricultural districts (distributed across three superregions)
for the years 2004 to 2012 is used to test the hypothesis that the three regions in
Botswana share the same production environment. A likelihood ratio test rejects the null
hypothesis that these regions operate under a common production environment. Therefore, a
stochastic metafrontier (MF) approach proposed by Battese., Rao, and O'Donnell (2004) and
O'Donnell, Rao, and Battese (2008) is used to calculate the technological gap and technical
efficiency scores. The study finds that the mean scores range from below 0.38 for Western
regions, 0.58 for the Central and 0.77 for the Southern region. These results suggest that
technology and knowledge diffusion through extension services will need to be designed in
such a way that it suits the particular environmental constraints in each region.