Evaluation of investments in gps guidance systems at Serbian crop family farms
2019
Todorović, Saša | Ivanović, Sanjin | Vasiljević, Zorica | Dimitrijević, Aleksandra | Zlatanović, Ivan
Agricultural production in Serbia is characterized by dominance of small family farms. Majority of them cultivate less than 3 hectares and therefore have very small economic size (less than 3,999 EUR). One of the ways to improve their economic performance and competitiveness is to use precision agriculture technologies. Considering the fact that such technologies are commonly used on big farms the question arises if such technologies are adequate for small farms cultivating less than 100 hectares. Therefore, the goal of this analysis is to evaluate economic efficiency of investments in global positioning systems on specialized crop farms using up to 100 hectares of arable land. Data for the research are gathered by survey of 30 family farms (operating in the region of Vojvodina) which specialized in crop production. Methodology is based on discounting approach for investment evaluation and use of annualized cost savings. To perform the analysis farms are divided in two groups – first group cultivates up to 50 hectares and uses state subsidies for investments in such technology, while second group of farms cultivates between 50 and 100 hectares and is not suitable for using subsidies. In total, four scenarios concerning investments in global positioning guidance system are analyzed in the paper. As a result, for all of them break-even number of hectares for various levels of costs savings have been determined. State subsidies proved to be significant incentive for introduction of precision agriculture technology.
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