Economic Analysis of Alternative Tillage Technologies: A Review of Research at the University of Kentucky

Choices between conventional tillage and reduced tillage are not entirely unambiguous in the current state of technology. It thus seems unlikely that reduced tillage will completely replace conventional tillage. Hence, analyses of the tradeoffs between the two tillage systems could provide useful information. This report summarizes several studies of alternative tillage technologies conducted by the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Kentucky, funded jointly by the Kentucky Agricultural Experiment station and a Title XII grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development. All of the studies use Kentucky data and analyze these technologies under Kentucky conditions. These studies were designed in part to facilitate similar studies in less-developed, equatorial countries. These studies had three primary foci: comparat ive microeconomic analysis of the relative costs and ret urns to conventional and minimum tillage, com parison of the socioeconomic characteristics of adopters and nonadopters of minimum tillage, and comparison of the regional economic impacts of adoption of minimum tillage.