Agriculture Reference
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weak negative correlation with TE of sugar beet. This suggests that farmers
with a strong economic orientation give relatively low nitrogen doses only
in winter wheat which has a low gross margin while in potato and sugar
beet they might give relatively high doses in order to prevent yields being
depressed by nitrogen shortage.
The external analysis correlated positively TE of winter wheat,
while there was a negative correlation with TE of potato and TE at farm
level. This means that knowledge of MINAS is negatively correlated with a
more efficient use of indirect energy. As an inefficient use of indirect
energy suggests a relative high fertiliser input, inefficient farms might be
more affected by the introduction of MINAS and therefore they were more
interested in MINAS.
The measurement of the elements of strategic management showed
that the external and internal knowledge of the workshop participants was
poor, as was their capacity to synthesise an optimal fertiliser strategy. The
measurement of the efficiency showed that there was considerable scope
for improvement and that this might be interesting from economic point of
view. Furthermore, the positive correlation between the technical
efficiency at farm level and the internal knowledge and the synthesis
indicates that improvement of these management aspects could improve
the efficiency. Overall, these results imply that a considerable
improvement of indirect energy use efficiency could be realised by
assisting farmers to analyse their own farm data and by the assessing an
appropriate fertilisation strategy. Communication on the positive
correlation between the technical efficiency and realised gross margin
should improve farmers' interest on this subject.
6. CONCLUSIONS
The main objective of this chapter was to explain differences in the
technical efficiency of indirect energy use of Dutch arable farmers through
differences in management in order to obtain keys for the reduction of
indirect energy use. The results of the analysis of management aspects
showed that: the farmers in the sample had a poor knowledge of relevant
agri-environmental policy for crop farming and of their own farm data and
that it was difficult to synthesise the relevant information into an optimal
fertilisation strategy.
The results of the DEA analysis showed that: there was a large
variation in TE between farms and crops. The average scores varied
between 33% and 61 %, indicating that for some of the farms and/or crops
there is scope for improving TE. Furthermore, a positive correlation was
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