The niche crops as a new prospective guideline for small farms

L. Udova and K. Prokopenko

Economy and Forecasting, 2018, issue 3, 102-117

Abstract: The article deals with the importance and economic potential of the niche crops, which are able to significantly diversify the existing grain-oil specialization of Ukrainian agriculture, reduce the domination of sunflower and rape in the crop rotation, whose excessive cultivation greatly depletes the upper layers of soil. The authors reveal various aspects of growing the niche crops including the advantages (high profitability, diversification of crop rotation, and production diversification) and disadvantages (high costs of sowing material and growing technologies, instability of demand for most niche crops, difficulty in finding the inlets for the niche produce, and uncertain profit expectations), and propose measures for their balancing. An important feature of the niche crops is the complexity of scaling their production and high resource consumption of their cultivation. The production of niche products can not become a prerogative of large business entities, since they use large areas of land under limited conditions, which is determined by natural and weather conditions, wide gauge machinery, automated control systems and logistics control. In contrast, small business entities can apply the agronomic measures that are necessary to grow niche crops, and therefore the production of the latter serves for them an important alternative in their operation. The high economic potential of niche crops is due to their high prices implementation and a significant, though unstable, demand on the agro-food market. Growing niche legumes is one of the most promising areas for the development of small agri-business. By observing their production technologies, you can get increased profits from 1 hectare of harvested area, even compared to some very liquid cereals and oil seeds. It has been established that small farms do not have the opportunity to enter foreign markets with traditional crops, but they can improve their profitability due to high quality and niche orientation of their manufactured produce, since such produce enjoys a constantly growing demand on the global market.

Date: 2018
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