Analysing Farmers’ Herbicide Use Pattern to Estimate the Magnitude and Field-Economic Value of Crop Diversification

Sabine Andert and Andrea Ziesemer
Additional contact information
Sabine Andert: Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of Rostock, Crop Health, Satower Straße 48, 18051 Rostock, Germany
Andrea Ziesemer: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Research Centre for Agriculture and Fisheries, Dorfplatz 1, 18276 Gülzow-Prüzen, Germany

Agriculture, 2022, vol. 12, issue 5, 1-11

Abstract: We present an on-farm approach to measure the effect of crop diversification on farmers’ field economic values. Eleven years of data (2010–2020) on the chemical herbicide use, tillage practices and crop yields of 17 farms in north-eastern Germany were examined for winter wheat (WW) and winter oilseed rape (WOSR). We used a common conceptual framework to classify farmers’ crop sequences according to their susceptibility to weeds (‘riskiness’). Linear mixed models were used to analyse the relationship between crop sequence, tillage practice (inversion/non-inversion) and the response variables ‘total herbicide costs’, ‘crop yield’ and ‘economic income’. Our results indicate that farmers in the area surveyed commonly grow crop sequences with a high risk of weeds. The driving forces behind this classification are high ratios of winter cereals and WOSR in the sequences. The most interesting result of our analysis is that farmers’ total herbicide costs ( THC fy ) significantly decreased from a higher to a lower riskiness class. Diversified crop sequences decreased the THC fy for WW by up to 12 EUR ha −1 and for WOSR by 19–56 EUR ha −1 . Considering the crop diversification effects, the combined influence of tillage and crop sequence seems to be important. Significant differences in crop yield between the riskiness classes were found in WW and WOSR solely in non-inversion tillage systems. Hence, the analysis of farmers’ ‘economic income’ revealed the great impact of crop diversification for non-inversion tillage systems. Indeed, we found that simplifying both crop sequence diversity and tillage intensity implies higher herbicide costs and, thereby, higher economic input. The best strategy for reducing herbicide costs in WW and WOSR cropping is to increase the use of summer crops or field grass as previous crops.

Keywords: on-farm data; riskiness; herbicide costs; crop yield; tillage practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/12/5/677/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/12/5/677/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:12:y:2022:i:5:p:677-:d:812152

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().