Economic evaluation of early peach (Prunus persica L. batsch) commercial orchard under different irrigation strategies

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to evaluate the economic response of different irrigation water levels in an early ripening peach variety. In this sense, we evaluate the economics and overall water use efficiency. The test is designed with 4 irrigation water strategies. The economic indices used that use net margin show that all the alternatives are viable al- though the control with its Net Margin (NM)/Cost (C) of 23.6% is of particular note. This is followed by R50, the high- est deficit treatment, with an NM/C of 16.0%. The mean production cost was almost identical in the optimal treatment (control) and the R50 deficit treatment, €0.69 and €0.70, respectively. R50 was the most efficient treatment, with a Wa- ter Use Efficiency (WUE) of 5.54 kg·m−3. The NM m−3 as economic efficiency index was the greatest in the control (0.74 € m−3), followed by R50 (0.65 € m−3), while the other treatments were far from these figures. Peach cultivation generates a lot of employment and in all cases the Number of Agricultural Jobs (NAJ) ha−1 was around 0.59. As regards the social efficiency of water, the deficit treatments we applied reached high values in this respect, reaching 181 NAJ hm−3 in R50.