Energy consumption assessment and economic analysis of irrigated wheat production in Iran

With increasing world population and energy limitations, access to sufficient energy in the future will be difficult. Assessing the energy balance can be a scientific method to measure the stability and sustainability of an agroecosystem are considered. The objective of this study was to evaluate the energy consumption and economic analysis of irrigated wheat production in seven provinces of Iran including Alborz, Isfahan, Ardebil, Khorasan-e-Razavi, Khuzestan, Golestan, and Hamadan. Required information of this study was collected via questionnaires and face to face interviews with irrigated wheat farmers in the studied provinces. Then, using energy equivalence equations, input and output energies and energy indices were calculated. The results showed that the highest and lowest input energy were obtained from Khorasan-e-Razavi and Golestan provinces with 104701 and 26198.07 MJ.ha-1, respectively. Alborz and Khorasan-e-Razavi provinces had the highest and lowest output energy in irrigated wheat production with 162169.28 and 122297.53 MJ.ha-1, respectively. The maximum contribution of input energy for Alborz, Ardebil, Khuzestan, Golestan and Hamadan provinces was regarding to chemical fertilizers, while for Isfahan and Khorasan-e-Razavi was irrigation energy. Average input energy, output energy, energy ratio, energy productivity and net energy gain for all the studied provinces were 58308.83 MJ.ha-1, 136092.15 MJ.ha-1, 2.87, 0.212 kg.MJ-1 and 77783.31 MJ.ha-1, respectively. Agricultural machinery with 34.87% had the largest contribution of production cost. The highest and lowest energy productivity values were obtained from Golestan and Khorasan-e-Razavi provinces with 0.38 and 0.08 kg.MJ-1, respectively. The average benefit to cost ratio was 2.16 and the economic productivity index was 0.154 kg per 103 Rials. The results of current study showed that the production of irrigated wheat in the studied areas of Iran is justifiable in terms of economic and energy balance. Therefore, with respect to energy sustainability in production and conservation agriculture principles, it is possible to increase the cultivation area of irrigated wheat production.