An Economic Analysis of Wheat Cultivation in North-Karnataka, India

Wheat is an important cereal crop in India as half of the population depends on wheat for food. The average wheat sown area of the country is 30.38 ha in the last five years from 2017-2022. The present paper was designed to study the cost of cultivation and return structure of wheat cultivation in Karnataka which comes under the peninsular zone where the total wheat cultivating area is 1.60 million ha. The study was undertaken in three major wheat-growing districts of Karnataka i.e., Belagavi, Vijayapura and Dharwad. The multistage random sampling method was followed for the selection of districts and farmers. The primary data was collected from 90 farmers (30 farmers from each district) and analyzed using tabular analysis. The results of the study revealed that per hectare total cost of cultivation of wheat at an aggregate level was ₹ 35,076.37 in which the share of the variable cost was 59.86 per cent and the fixed cost was 40.14 per cent. Among the variable costs, human labour cost was highest (21.95%) per hectare and in fixed cost, the rental value of land (34.63%) was highest. The gross return and net return obtained by the farmer were ₹ 54,786.56 and ₹ 19,710.18 and the return per rupee of expenditure was found to be 1.55 indicating that wheat is a profitable crop enterprise. However, the cost of production per quintal was found ₹ 1,869.60 and the profits obtained were ₹1,008.27 per quintal. Lack of labour and high cost of labour was the major problem in wheat cultivation. Hence, boosting up the mechanization may help to reduce the cost of cultivation. Using custom hiring centres and farmer producer organization approaches would better augment the mechanization in the wheat economy.