Economic and Energy Efficiency of Farms in Poland

Abstract

Climate change and negative environmental effects are results of a simplified understanding of management processes, i.e., assuming economic effects as the basis for development, without taking into account external costs. Economically efficient facilities are not always environmentally efficient. Due to the existing conflict of economic and environmental goals, it seems necessary to look for measures that would include both economic and environmental elements in their structure. The above doubts were the main reasons for undertaking this research. One of the important sectors of the economy accepted for research, where energy is an essential factor of production, is agriculture. Agricultural production is very diversified both in terms of inputs and final products. Depending on the production direction, the processes of conversion of energy accumulated in inputs into energy accumulated in commodity products have different natures and relationships. Taking into account the importance of agriculture in the national economy and the current environmental needs of the world, the types of farms generating energy surplus and those in which the surplus is the least cost-consuming were indicated. The research used the economic and energy efficiency index, which makes it possible to jointly assess technical and economic efficiency. Assuming the need to produce food with low energy consumption and a positive energy balance, it is reasonable to develop a support system for those farms showing the highest economic and energy efficiency indicators.

Environmental Benefits of Catch Crops Cultivation

“…This thesis is confirmed by the results obtained from the analysis of energy efficiency of spring wheat production which demonstrates that conventional tillage contributes to increased production costs (e.g. fuel inputs are about 30% higher than for conservation tillage) [21,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Therefore, conservation tillage combined with cultivation of white mustard as a catch crop can be tentatively recommended to be applied in agricultural practice.…”

“…The economic evaluation may only include direct costs, being based on an incomplete simplified calculation, and in consequence the gross margin is calculated as the difference between the value of grain harvested per ha and the direct costs of industrial production means. In the opinion of many authors [18][19][20][21][22][23], intensification of inputs on cereal cropping does not cause a significant increase and thus the gross margin is the highest when economical or moderately intensive technology is used. In their study.…”

Economic and Environmental Aspects of Agriculture in the EU Countries

“…In order to evaluate and compare economic sectors including agriculture in various countries, traditional indicators are often used, i.e., labour productivity or land productivity [7,20,105] (Table 3). Attention is also more and more often paid to the efficiency of energy use [98,106]. EU agriculture is characterised by substantial variation in labour productivity and land productivity.…”