engleski

Model for costs calculation in manure application

Climate changes have a significant impact on the most important aspects of agricultural production: ecosystem fertility, yield, production costs and revenues. The elasticity of the agroecosystem, as the ability to neutralize stressful conditions, significantly corelate the content of organic matter in the soil, which coul be increased by fertilization with manure. The lower price of manures than mineral fertilizers is an additional reason for their use. However, because of relatively low total content of nutrients (e.g. 1- 5 %) compared to mineral fertilizers (e.g. 21-64 %), the large amounts of manure (on average around 35 t/ha, but can vary 10-50 t/ha) should be applied. The consequence are increased costs of transport and application, especially if production areas are far from the place of manure storage. The goal of this paper is to create a model for calculating the costs of manure application, which uses as initial variables: the content of nutrients in the manure, the fertilization needs (depends on the soil fertility and the crop demands), the price of mineral fertilizers and manure, the distance and size of the production area, the need for hired transport of manure to production area, and the capacity, speed and working capacity of the manure spreader. It was found that up to a certain distance it is more profitable to transport manure with a spreader without additional hiring of transport, but this depends not only on the price of the hired transport (e.g. 1.5 EUR/t) but also on the capacity of the spreader. For example, with a spreader capacity of 14 t, it is more profitable to hire transport at a distance of more than 4.21 km to the plot, and with a spreader capacity of 10 t, it is more profitable to hire transport at a distance of more than 3 km. Also, the share of manure application costs in the total costs of organo-mineral fertilization significantly depends on the total fertilization needs and the need for hired transport (i.e. the distance of the plot). In the total costs of organo-mineral fertilization (from 347 EUR/ha on fertile soils to 1, 026 EUR/ha on poor soils), the costs of manure fertilization are from 160 to 668 EUR/ha. The share of manure application in the costs of fertilization on plots 100 m away ranges from 5.04 to 8.38 %, and on plots 5 km away (without hired transport) it ranges from 14.7 to 23.7 %. Hiring transport for a plots distant more than 3 or 4, 21 km decrease total cost of fertilization with manure, but also increases the share of application (hired transport and spreader costs) in total costs. The model determined that by increasing the plot distance, the share of manure application costs in the structure of organic fertilization costs increases from 5.04% (poor soils, distance 100 m) to 23.80% (fertile soils, distance 10 km).

costs ; effectiveness ; manure spreader capacity ; manure transport

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