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Economic Analysis of Introducing the Cultivation of Fahl Berseem in the Crop Rotation and its Impact on Egyptian Land Capability
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Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(27), No.(4), Cairo, Egypt, December 2017.
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The need to improve agricultural productivity and environmental sustainability is obvious in a changing environment. In this respect, special interest is paid to soil fertility. Hence, the sustainable agricultural development strategy till 2030 aims at introducing Fahl berseem cultivar (mono-cut type) grown in the transition period between rice and wheat (a crop sequence of early-maturing rice/Fahl berseem/wheat) to enrich nitrogen content of soil by fixing atmospheric nitrogen, in addition to improve soil proprieties and organic matter.
This study, therefore, attempts to analyze and assess the economic impact of introducing the cultivation of Fahl berseem in the crop rotation on the Egyptian land capability. To accomplish this goal, the study employed some efficiency indicators and the production function of wheat (including a dummy variable taking a value of one for following the crop sequence, and value zero otherwise) to data collected from 100 farmers equally divided into two groups; Group I “farmers following the crop sequence” and Group II “farmers following rice/wheat rotation”. The results revealed that the average yield of wheat grains produced following the crop sequence was exceeded that achieved for the rice/wheat rotation by 25.5%. This increase is attributed to improving soil nitrogen content and organic matter when following the crop sequence due to Fahl berssem cultivation, thus saving the costs of fertilizers that was added for wheat cultivation immediately after rice. This, in turn, increased the profitability of wheat produced following the crop sequence as compared to the rice/wheat rotation since the B/C ratio reached about LE 2.44 for the former and LE 1.78 for the latter.
The results showed statistically significant increase effect of following this crop sequence on wheat production. Besides, Fahl berseem requires less water with water productivity reaching about 21.23 kg/m3, respectively compared to about 13.85 and 10.83 kg/m3 for long and short berseem. This result revealed that Fahl berseem is more efficient in terms of water use.
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| URL |
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| Publication year |
2017
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| Pages |
1671 - 1680
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| Availability location |
مكتبة معهد بحوث الاقتصاد الزراعي-7 ش نادى الصيد - مبنى الهيئات والشركات - الدقي- الجيزة (الدور الرابع)
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| Availability number |
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| Organization Name |
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| City |
القاهرة
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| serial title |
المجلة المصرية للاقتصاد الزراعي
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| Web Page |
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| Author(s) from ARC |
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| Publication Type |
Journal
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