Computing the Cost Economics of Agricultural Machinery in Farms

Abstract

Farm mechanization accelerates faster agricultural growth through the efficient use of machines by ensuring the timeliness of agricultural operations, reducing the cost of operation, and by reducing human drudgery. Farm machinery ownership and operating costs represent a substantial portion of total crop production expenditure. Cost economics becomes important for farm machinery managers to control the machinery costs per hectare. The manual procedure of determining the cost economics of agricultural machinery is a time-consuming process and finally making a smart decision whether to buy a farm machine or to go for custom hiring is a cumbersome process. The web application was designed for naive users to help the users in making the decision. The user is asked to enter the basic data pertaining to the farm machine, and the software decides whether to acquire the farm machine or to go for custom hiring. The cost of operating a farm machine can be computed with ease by using the web application. Further, the break-even-point, payback period and benefit-cost ratio can also be determined with a single click