Analysis of changes in energy use pattern of wheat crop in two decades – A study of central India

Abstract

For sustainable agriculture a fair balance between different categories of input energy with optimum output need to be established. The main objective of this paper was to investigate the energetics of wheat production for long term (20 years) in central India through a large scale survey which focused on (i) Farmers categories wise energy use pattern (ii) operation wise energy use pattern (iii) source wise energy use pattern. The finding of this research showed that as the farm size increased the input energy per unit was also increased. The input energy was found minimum for marginal farmer’s categories and the maximum energy input for large farmers. The minimum and maximum input energy among all the survey period was found in range of 4780 to 7199 MJ ha^-1 and 8300 to 11638 MJ ha^-1 for marginal and large farmers. In last survey large farmers were using 17.8% to 38.3 % more input energy than marginal farmers. Operation-wise irrigation shows highest input energy followed by seed bed preparation, sowing, transportation and other operations. The use of non-commercial energy sources were reducing over time and transformed to commercial energy sources. Use of renewable source of energy was decreased and use of non-renewable source of energy increased. Similar trend was observed for direct energy and indirect energy sources. Direct energy was decreased and use of indirect source of energy increased. The increase in the productivity of wheat shows that as the use of energy increased the yield was also increased. The yield of wheat was increased in range of 16.88-33.57%, specific energy requirement reduced in range of 25-42.24 % and the energy use efficiency increase in range of 25.21-42.15%. Better management of inputs, mechanization, quality seed, plant protection, controlled irrigation resulted into a great positive effect which resulted in higher energy use efficiency.