Cost benefit index for tillage systems

Abstract

Tillage operations are among the crop production activities that demand a high amount of energy. The cost of energy from fossil fuels has increased continuously so conservation tillage which uses less operations is a good option to decrease production costs. The objective of this work was to compare the production costs under two conservation tillage systems (No tillage and Vertical Tillage)
with the production cost of Conventional Tillage in the production of forage oats. To calculate the costs, it was measured the use of fuel at each tillage operation, work capacity of the configuration  ractor implement and the crop yield as well as the costs of the tractor and implements. With the total cost and benefit at each system it was calculated de Cost-Benefit Index. The highest benefit was obtained under the vertical tillage (index = 2.19) for each monetary unit invested, the earns were 1.19 units. The conventional tillage had a cost benefit index of 2.02 with net gains of 1.02 of monetary units and zero tillage had an index of 1.98 which means a net gain of 0.98 monetary units for each invested unit.Vertical tillage had 14% and 17% more gains compared to conventional and zero tillage. The latter two systems had a very similar cost benefit with differences only of 3% among them.