Financial Evaluation of Conservation Agriculture Technology in Wheat Production of Fars Province: Translog cost function approach

One of the important aspects of sustainable land management is conservation agriculture, principles of tillage and land preparation for planting product. The overall goal of conservation agriculture is better use of agricultural resources through improved management of soil resources, water and biological resources in general, so that minimizing the use of external inputs. Therefore considering that planners and policy makers in their decisions always rely on cost - benefit analyses, and these analyses are rely on quantitative and monetary analyses. So this study has been done with the purpose of financial evaluation of conservation agriculture application in wheat production in Fars province. For this purpose, the necessary information of financial evaluation has been collected through field studies and completed of 122 questionnaires and interviews in the crop year 1392. Based on the financial evaluation results, on average in the regions studied, gross profit per hectare of conservation cultivation of wheat has been 2.5 times of gross profit of conventional cultivation per hectare of wheat which are on the one hand due to higher crop yields in conservation technology and on the other hand, due to the low costs which are paid for planting a hectare of wheat in the mentioned system. Base on the results, estimated parameters of cost function indicated that conservation technology adoption could reduce total cost to 36 percent. In other word changing technology from conventional to conservation agriculture in studying region on average led to save 8383 thousand Rials per hectare in wheat production cost. Therefore, it is expected that promotion of such technologies could help the production process in the agricultural sector to be more economical