After-Harvest Cost Analysis Made By Farm Managers In China And How This Impacts The Environment

Each year after crops are harvested, there is a period of crop residue management. With the yields becoming higher due to the new technology, the volume of crop residue becomes also higher. Agricultural crop residue burning(ACRB) has been the most popular practice among Chinese farmers because of its cost. There has been much criticism of both economic and social impact of such farm practice. Currently, in China stubble burning is used as the main method due to being most cost efficient and least time consuming. However, it leads to many problems like air pollution, depletion of nutrients and organic matter, soil blowing and several others. This is the reason why in some countries stubble burning has been made illegal. The author will analyze the alternatives to ACRB such as stubble harvesting and stubble incorporation. Stubble harvesting could be used as a source of feeding cattle or as a source of energy. Such process is very labor intensive and would require very high up front investment since most stubble harvesting equipment has very low capacity. Stubble incorporation could be used as another alternative that has several major advantages. With the new technology, a farmer should be able to cut residue and leave it on top of the field at a very high speed and a relatively low cost per hectare. This layer of mulch could serve as a source of fertilizer, it could retain moisture, and prevent soil from blowing. However, in the current economic situation in China, such method could be used only with the government assistance in a form of a direct subsidy for purchasing the necessary tillage equipment, a subsidy per each hectare of non-burned fields, or organization of co-ops that would provide such service to the farmers. The purpose of this research is to determine what is the best long term solution to dealing with crop residue from the position of cost accounting. The Chinese farmer will stop burning his residue only if he could have another financially sound alternative. The main methods of this study are observations, surveys and economic modeling. Also, the research will use some of the data from the experiments that were conducted in this area by other researchers.