BETTER MANAGEMENT CAN IMPROVE THE EFFICIENCY OF INDIRECT ENERGY - Economics of Sustainable Energy in Agriculture - page 12

consider the concept of strategic management to be a useful approach for
analysing the decision-making process at the tactical and operational levels
too. At the tactical management level, the concept of strategic management
can help to elucidate the personal factors that affect the selection of
production techniques in a given farm organisation and external
environment. The concept can provide relevant insights into the relation
between management aspects and the farm's technical and economic

performance.

3. METHODS AND MATERIAL

3.1 Methods

A workshop with nine arable farmers for whom bookkeeping data were
available from the Dutch Farm Accountancy Network (FADN) was
organised in which the following elements of strategic management were
measured: the firm mission, the external analysis, the internal analysis and
the production technique. These elements were made operational by
relating them to a specific case, the fertilisation legislation in the
Netherlands known as MINAS (Mineral Accounting System). MINAS
assesses and taxes overuse of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) and will
become mandatory for crop farms by 2001. MINAS was chosen as a case
study because in this accounting system efficient use of nitrogen is crucial.
Nitrogen is also the most important factor in the indirect energy use by
arable farmers in The Netherlands (IMET 1994). The amount of energy
required to manufacture the commonly applied nutrients indicates the
relevance of nitrogen: 1 kg N, 1 kg and 1 kg require 38.6 MJ, 3.3

MJ and 2.5 MJ, respectively (IMET 1994).
An interesting question with regard to the introduction of MINAS
is whether a farmer synthesises his mission with internal and external
analysis, and comes up with an optimal fertilisation tactic. In order to
measure the quality of the farmer's synthesis, the participants were asked
twice to indicate their fertilisation tactic with the introduction of MINAS.
However, the second time they were asked to enter their fertilisation plan
into an interactive simulation model which used their farm data and
enabled them to optimise their fertilisation tactic by trial and error. By
comparing the simulated fertilisation tactic, yield levels and nutrient
surpluses with those previously indicated by the farmers, an indication was
obtained about the quality of the synthesis. Next Data Envelopment
Analysis (DEA) was used to quantify the relative energy efficiency for
each farmer. The relationships between the management aspects of the