ABSTRACT

The paper presents preliminary results from a recent survey of Texas cotton growers to collect and correlate information about reduced tillage adoption and the age, size, and cost of their tractor fleet. Linear and nonlinear regression was used to test the hypothesis that reduced tillage adoption is associated with longer lived tractors with fewer repairs, smaller horsepower requirements, and overall lower costs. The preliminary results indicate that nonlinear relationships were a better fit. OLS regressions of tractor costs on reduced tillage adoption and other regressors had a very low R-square statistic.