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An Economic Assessment for the Effect of Farm Location along the same Irrigation Canal on Crop Production in Dakahlia Governorate
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Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(26), No.(1), Cairo, Egypt, March 2016.
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For the sake of testing the hypothesis that head, middle and tail-end farms located along the same canal gain the same yields, same levels of economic efficiency and water use efficiency, the current study aims at analysing the impact of farm location on such variables for a sample of 140 farmers selected from Dakahlia Governorate using a mathematical model by means of dummy variable technique and estimating the production functions for the studied crops. Our findings showed that farm location significantly affected the yields, total revenues and gross margins for all of the studied crops whereas, it is found that farm location significantly affected the variable costs, water productivity and gross margins per unit of water for wheat, sugar beet, rice, and cotton grown in the three locations.
The results of the developed mathematical model showed statistical significant effect of farm location on the yields and total revenues of wheat, clover, sugar beet and maize whereas, there was significant effect of farm location on the gross margins of clover, rice and maize.
Our results are supported by another study by (El-Amir et al, 2001) indicating that the yields of major crops grown at the head and in the middle of the canals are significantly higher than those obtained at the tail-ends due to inequality of water distribution along farms on the canal. Head-reach farmers gained the highest average total revenues for wheat and clover crop rotations in the study area whereas, tail-end farmers gained the highest average total revenues for sugar beet crop rotations. The results showed significant effect of location on the average total revenues of all crop rotations among farm locations and the developed mathematical model showed significant effect of farm location on the average total revenues all crop rotations in the study area, as well. Based on these results, it was found that farm location along the same canal affects the crops’ yields, economic efficiency, water use efficiency, average total revenues of crop rotations prevailing in the study area.
In order to decrease the farm-level variations in yields and inequities in water distribution along different reaches of the same canal, the current study recommends the need to replace traditional open earthen canals by new improved ones and reallocate water supplies among head and tail-enders using continuous irrigation water flow so that tail-enders can better cope with risks associated with water unavailability. The government is also advised to give due attention to farm location on the same canal for the design of the cropping pattern and to encourage farmers to formulate Water Users’ Associations (WUAs). This is expected to pave the way to ensure equal water distribution thus, reduce the conflict over water among farmers in the head, middle and tail-ends. This sheds light on the need for reforming existing WUAs already in place so that the concerns of the tail-enders could be better heard in the decision-making process. Tail-enders are encouraged to promote on-farm agronomic practices targeting saving irrigation water e.g. using short-age and water-saving improved varieties, using raised-bed, using deficit irrigation technique, switching to crops that need less water to boost water use efficiency, carrying out night irrigation … etc.
Our recommendations are supported not only by our findings but also by the objectives of the Agricultural Sustainable Development Strategy 2030 targeting rationalizing water and land use through improving land and water use, introduction of improved varieties, and improving the livelihood of rural inhabitants (MALR, 2009). Moreover, these recommendations are in perfect concordance with the objectives of the Draft of the Development and Management of Water Resources Strategy 2050 targeted improving on-farm water management practices such as developing canal and water distribution structures, and forming WUAs (MWRI, 2010).
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| URL |
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| Publication year |
2016
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| Pages |
ص ص 13:30
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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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| Author(s) from ARC |
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| Agris Categories |
Production economicsWater resources and management
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AGROVOC
TERMS |
Efficiency.
Irrigated farming.
Irrigation.
Irrigation systems.
Irrigation water.
Production functions.
Resource conservation.
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| Proposed Agrovoc |
ANOVA(تحليل تباين);
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| Publication Type |
Journal
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