Comparative Analysis of Soil Tillage Systems Regarding Economic Efficiency and the Conversion Efficiency of Energy Invested in the Agrosystem of Winter Wheat

The paper presents the experimental results on the influence of different soil tillage systems and technological subsystems on the production and conversion efficiency, on the energy invested in the winter wheat crop cultivated in the Transylvanian Plain. The methodology was based on an econometric model, taking into account the combination of production factors and their limited character, as well as the two aspects of economic activity, to maximize profit and to minimize effort. The results show that by practising reduced tillage and no-tillage, the total power consumption can be reduced by 7.8%, and 12.4%, respectively, compared to the conventional system in the case of winter wheat. Up to the sowing phase (including) a decrease of 59.5% fuel consumption per hectare was achieved in the case of reduced tillage compared to the conventional system and a decrease of 78.7% fuel consumption in the no-tillage system. The highest average production was obtained whilst using the reduced tillage, followed by the one from the conventional and no-tillage systems. The highest degree of total energy efficient use (REE=5.84) as well as the highest net energy (EN)were obtained in the reduced tillage system, followed by the no-tillage. The econometric analysis shows that any additional energy consumption of input factors in the conventional system, like human labor requirement, energy incorporated in machinery and fuel consumption had negative effects on yield and leads to a comedown of the economic and energetic balance. The aforemention factors had the following negative values of elasticity coefficients: -0.5264, -0.5965 and -0.2629. The chemical fertilizers (+0.3237) and chemicals (+0.1074) had positive effects on the wheat yield. Surprisingly, the effect of seeds was not significant. The highest quantity of energy spent for the production of winter wheat was indirect and non-renewable.