Farm size and energy costs in forced vegetable growing

Tégla, Zsolt

Keywords: sources of energy, energy resources, integrated forcing of vegetables, heating performance, economies of scale

The prospects for forced vegetable production based on thermal energy and renewable energy (heating with wood chips) are promising in Hungary. In this field, it is predominantly businesses with 3 or 5 hectares of land, using geothermal energy and biomass heating, which are able to achieve profits allowing them to launch soilless integrated vegetable forcing operations. The operating result of fossil sources of energy per 100 W of heating capacity enabled businesses with 0.5 and 1 hectare of land to only achieve negative or very low profits in the model farms studied. Benefits of the scale of business first appeared in the vegetable forcing models farming on 3 hectares for all forms of heating, but increasing land size only caused a slight increase of the index figures for the model farms with 5 or 10 hectares of land.

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