So by now you would have used MyCrop to diagnose what pest or diseases may be
present in your crop.
The next thing you need to know is whether it is worth treating
and which treatment option or strategy is most economic for you.
To help you calculate this the MyEconomic tool has been developed
For demonstration purposes let's assume you have stripe rust
Firstly you enter the crop, we have a wheat to crop.
Secondly the expected yield, let's say a two and a half tonne crop
our minimum yield this year could be one and a half tonnes
and our maximum yield could be three and a half tons per hectare.
Our expected farm gate price that is your price less
all freight and storage costs which is around two hundred and fifty dollars a
tonne
you next go down and input potential yield loss
should you not read your crop for the stripe rust. We estimate the yield loss
if we do not treat the rust
would be in the range 20 percent to 70 percent
Now we look at our treatment options
which could also be a strategy. Options could include the application rate
how many times you apply it, timing whether you use
aerial spray or boom spray and so on. A whole range of options and scenarios can
be put into these tool.
In our example we are going to compare a cheap chemical
treatment A to a more expensive but more effective chemical
treatment B. We need to enter possible ranges of yield loss for each treatment
option.
Even if both treatments could be 100 percent effective
we are still going to have track damage due to the boom spray which will
incur a yield
loss of around four percent for our farm. We estimate that if
treatment A doesn't work as effectively as desired yield loss could be up to 35
percent
Now we enter the cost of treatment
which is the cost of the chemical plus labor and all application costs.
In this case we have worked it out to be thirty dollars per hectare.
Now we input for treatment B. Again we have the minimum track damage of 4
percent yield loss
but this treatment is more effective and the maximum yield loss possible
is 15 percent however this treatment is more expensive
at fifty dollars per hectare. Once you've entered in this data
you simply click calculate to get the result. Here are the results presented in a
table
comparing two treatment options to not treating the stripe rust
titled here as no control. Here is the expected net income on average for each
scenario.
The expected net benefit is simply the difference between expected net income
if you treat with option
A verses not treating it. Then it measures the expected time that each
scenario is the best option
and in this case option B has a better expected net income than the
other two options ninety-nine percent of the time.
Then we look at the return on investment which is important to consider
particularly if funds are scarce. In this case treatment A has a much higher return on
investment then treatment B.
When you compare between options you should always weigh up the return on
investment against the expected net benefit.
This is because funds that could be saved using the cheaper option
which may be redeployed in other parts of the farm business
where higher returns on investment are achievable
and finally we show here the probability a breaking
even. This says that one hundred percent of the time
option A and option B will have a positive effect on net income.
The results are shown in graphical form
firstly we have the cumulative distribution function
which shows the probability level associated with net incomes being
greater than or less than a certain value. For example in 25 percent of the
time
the expected net income will be $286 dollars per hectare or less
for no control verses $409 dollars per hectare for treatment option
A or $445 dollars per hectare
for treatment option B.
This pie chart simply shows the percentage of time
each treatment option is the best outcome. This shows that option
A was the best outcome in terms of expected net income
one percent of the time. In this table you can see the assumptions that were used
in generating this result.
We can then go back and change these assumptions to see how sensitive the
result is
by simply clicking recalculate here
to adjust values. There are often other things to consider when making the
decision on the treatment option
not just the simple economic showing here today. These considerations can be
pre and post crop
as well as in crop and can be found by selecting your constraint on the drop
box below here.
We have stripe rust so we simply select stripe rust
here to see considerations we need to make
when assessing whether to treat. To see these in further detail
you can simply click here. We hope this tool will assist you to calculate the
economic impact of various treatment options for numerous constraints in your
crop.