Abstract
Efficient use of energy helps to achieve improved production and productivity, and contributes to economy, profitability and competitiveness of agricultural sustainability. The aim of the present study was to compare open field and greenhouse tomato production systems in terms of energy efficiency, energy intensiveness, energy productivity, benefit to cost ratio and amount of renewable and non-renewable energy uses. Data were collected from 128 and 16 open field and greenhouse tomato growers, respectively, by using a face-to-face questionnaire in 2010. The results showed that the total energy requirement under open field and greenhouse systems were 47647.12 and 2102678.73 MJ ha-1, respectively. The share of direct, indirect, renewable and non-renewable energies from total energy input which average in open field and greenhouse production systems were 74%, 26%, 17% and 83%, respectively. Energy use efficiency was achieved 1.42 and 0.18 in open field and greenhouse, respectively. The benefit to cost ratios of 2.33 in open field and 3.06 in greenhouse was recorded. Based on the present results, open field tomato production system had higher energy efficiency in comparison with greenhouse tomato production system while greenhouse system had a higher economical benefit.
Highlights
Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) is one of the major vegetables products worldwide
The share of direct energy used in greenhouse system was 47% higher than open field system
The results indicated that diesel fuel, water for irrigation, fertilizers, machinery and electricity energies contributed the major portion of the energy inputs used in tomato production systems
Summary
Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) is one of the major vegetables products worldwide. It was cultivated on 161800 ha and the total production was 5.9 million tones in 2009, in Iran. Khorasan Razavi province with 14000 ha open filed tomato is one of the greatest tomato cultivation areas in Iran (Anonymous, 2009). In this province, tomato is a main source for fresh using and processing industries. Tomato greenhouse production is one of the most intensive and energyconsuming production systems In this respect, the energy budget is very important. Energy budget is the numerical comparison of the relationship between input and output of a system in terms of energy units (Canakci and Akinci, 2006)
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