Generolo Jono Žemaičio Lietuvos karo akademija

Natural conditions and traditions of agriculture production are challenging by sustainable development in Slovakia. The significant portion of arable land is devoted to the cultivation of crops, especially cereals, feed crops and industry crop. There is a high representation of mountains areas in country, therefore the fertile lowlands in west-south and east part are the primary locations of almost all agricultural production. The main objective of this work is to integrate the bio-physical crop data on yields with the economic data enabling to calculate net returns, in order to identify alternative costs of agricultural management practices for cultivation of 13 most important crops in selected west-south regions of Slovakia. We use bottom up optimization model which is based on linear programming. Management practices are differentiated according to nutrient input and irrigation application in order to evaluate yields as well as environmental factor – water use efficiency. Results suggest that in terms of net returns the management practices with high and medium nutrient input without irrigation are the most profitable but can represent a potential environmental pressure for soil. Such kind of optimization targets to create a better condition to reach environmental and economic balance of crop production.

The paper presents a calculation technique and projections on the indices of social efficiency of sustainable land management. The relevance of this study is determined by the authors’ technique measuring social, economic and environmental efficiency parity, and its implementation prospects in the context of more sustainable land management in Ukraine as a country that has tremendous potential for its use with a potential worldwide impact on food markets. The paper is aimed at presenting the technique of projecting social efficiency of land management in the context of sustainable development. Projections about the integral efficiency of land management are made according to the developed criteria (productivity, motivation, consistency) using the map of projected effects using conventional and relative, as well as absolute input parameters. This enables improved information support during the formation of national sustainable development strategy of land relations development. The authors substantiate the methodological approaches to planning parameters of land use in dynamics, which are based on determining the impact, including social one, and evaluation of social efficiency of sustainable land management, which allow diagnostics at meso- and macroeconomic scale and can also become tools for scenario modeling.