ABSTRACT

The paper presents results from a mixed integer, whole farm analysis that explicitly model machinery and full-time labor is best to analyze tillage studies. When decoupled farm payments are excluded, the economics of crop farming in the study area requires a large scale to be economically viable. Furthermore, the results highlight that crop, technology, and equipment selection is misleading if decoupled payments are included. The results show that if, at a given scale, there isn't enough time for additional acres of conventional crop/tillage systems, growers might be able to reduce fixed costs and increase returns/acre by adding residual amounts of reduced tillage crops..