Farm level examination of fertiliser and pesticide use in some major crop sectors

Vágó, Szabolcs – Varga, Éva – Boldog, Valéria – Kruppa, Bertalan

Keywords: input utilization, input distribution, input prices, production cost, income

This study describes the main market for fertilisers and pesticides, and examines the reactions of distribution to sales price and income changes. Direct sales of fertilisers and pesticides to farmers are highly concentrated, both the fertiliser and pesticide markets are dominated by a few large companies. The correlation between crop prices and the cost of inputs per hectare proved to be strong. In other words, in the case of higher crop prices, the farmers increased their purchase of inputs. We found even stronger correlations between the production value and the purchases of fertilisers and pesticides. Categorising the farms by the cost of fertilisers and pesticides per hectare, we found that with the increasing of the fertiliser and pesticide costs per hectare only slowly reduced the number of farms. Increasing fertiliser use results in higher yields, up to the last category. However, above a particular level of pesticide use yields declined. There is a slow but definite increase in production costs caused by increasing the input use. For the cost of the main product, we could not find an optimal point of input utilisation.

Full article