Economic analysis of some agrotechnical factors in maize production - a Hungarian case study

Abstract

This paper focuses on the economic and statistical evaluation of the production technology findings of the polyfactorial maize production experiments carried out between 2015-2017 at the Látókép Experiment Site of the University of Debrecen, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences and Environmental Management. The examined agrotechnical factors included irrigation, previous crop, tillage, crop density, hybrid and N nutrient supply, while the effect of different crop years was taken into consideration. In addition to descriptive statistical methods, we used multivariate regression analysis during the statistical evaluation. In the course of the evaluation, we examined three models that differed in terms of tillage methods and the consideration of crop year. In our best fit model, the factors were 71% responsible for the change in yield value. We carried out efficiency and comparative analyses in the course of the economic evaluation. Averaged over the three examined years, it can be stated that nutrient supply and crop year had an outstanding effect on yield, while irrigation had a minimal effect. However, global warming may justify irrigation in the future, not only from a biological point of view, but also from an economic aspect. Ideal tillage is also greatly affected by crop year, too. Altogether, of the examined tillage systems, subsoiling proved to be the best from an economic point of view. Our investigations confirm that it is better to perform intensive farming under more favourable market conditions. The optimum of N fertilisation is probably outside of the range we examined, if the extreme changes in maize and fertiliser prices are ignored. JEL Classification: Q16, Q12, Q13, O32

Keywords

• precision farming
• year effect
• fertilization
• profit
• efficiency