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The Economic Impact of Wheat Intercropping Systems in the Old Lands on the use of Land and Water Resources
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Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(27), No.(2B), Cairo, Egypt, June 2017.
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Wheat is the most important cereal crop in Egypt due to its importance in the Egyptian diet. However, the local wheat production does not cover the domestic consumption and consequently, boosting wheat local production is a national goal to narrow the gap between consumption and production and improve food security. On the other hand, the limited land and water resources available to Egypt precipitate the need to find ways to streamline these resources. These targets can be achieved by means of raising wheat productivity through growing high yielding varieties and using improved agro-techniques e.g. intercropping, where one crop share its life cycle or part of it with another crop. Thus, the current study attempts to assess the economic impact of wheat intercropping systems on wheat production in the old lands, since about 81% of wheat cultivated area is located at the old lands and some wheat intercropping systems are solely suitable for the old lands, as well. Consequently, the objectives of this study are mainly concerned with assessing the impact of using such systems on wheat production, economic efficiency, efficiency of using land and water resources and on some technical and economic variables as compared to wheat monoculture. These systems include wheat intercropping with winter tomato, sugar beet and autumn sugarcane and relay intercropping cotton with wheat. To accomplish these goals, the study depended on descriptive and statistical analysis techniques. The total and variable costs of sole wheat production reached about 5.74 and 3.84 thousand LE/feddan, respectively. The total revenue of sole wheat reached about 9.41 LE/feddan whereas, its B/C ratio reached about 1.64. Moreover, the total and variable costs of intercropped wheat ranged between about 3.24-5.40 and 0.46-2.78 thousand LE/feddan, respectively based on wheat intercropping system used. Besides, the total revenue of intercropped wheat ranged between about 4.70-8.47 thousand LE/feddan upon the system used. Furthermore, the net return on wheat ranged between 1.34-3.07 LE/feddan while, their B/C ratio of these system ranged between 1.31-1.59, indicating the profitability of these system. The results revealed that wheat intercropping systems contribute to improving the efficiency of using land and water resources since water productivity for intercropped wheat ranged between 0.73-1.11 kg/m3 whereas, the economic return of one cubic meter for intercropped wheat ranged between 0.57-1.33 LE/m3 upon the system used. Based on these results, the study revealed that the dissemination of such systems on wheat produced in the old lands increases wheat production by about 82-616 thousand tons upon wheat intercropping system used. This in turn positively affected the deficit in the agricultural trade balance by reducing the value of wheat imports by about USD 725-848 thousand based on the system used.
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| URL |
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| Publication year |
2017
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| Pages |
1099 - 1108
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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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