Economic Analysis of Cucumber Cultivation Under Polyhouse and Open Field Conditions in Jaipur District of Rajasthan

Abstract

Protective cultivation is a cropping technique in which the microclimate surrounding the plant is modified in part or whole to meet the plant’s requirement for the appearance of its output potential. Besides production of a commodity, marketing is also one of the important issues to enhance the profitability by removing the marketing middlemen. The government has taken many steps like e- NAM, e-mandi etc. to attain the aim of doubling farmer’s income. After all these initiatives, there were some production and marketing related issues in the study area. Keeping that in view, the present study was concentrated on production, marketing of produce and related problems. Different measures like costs and returns, benefit- cost ratio, price spread, producer’s share in consumer’s rupees and Garrett’s ranking method were used for the study. Major socio- economic factors identified were family size, age, caste category, occupation, education level, cropping pattern, annual expenditure, farm assets and liabilities. The conditions of polyhouse cucumber growers were found to be better than the open field growers because of higher qualification and more assets. Findings illustrated that the total cost of cucumber cultivation was Rs. 289815.10 and Rs. 93726.24 per acre in polyhouse and open field, whereas gross return was Rs. 543509.68 and Rs. 137301.08 per acre. The net return of cultivation was Rs. 253694.58 and Rs. 43574.84 per acre under respective cultivation. In Polyhouse cucumber cultivation, higher B-C ratio (1.88) was observed in comparison to open field cultivation (1.46) which showed that former was more profitable than latter. In marketing study of produce two channels were identified in the study area in which channel II was more efficient than channel I in both polyhouse (65.25 %) and open field produce marketing (57.96 %) because of higher percentage of producer’s share in consumer’s rupees. Total marketing cost of polyhouse produce in channel I and II were estimated Rs. 293.58 and Rs. 240.00 per quintal, whereas in open field Rs. 262.25 and Rs. 197.40 per quintal. The major problem of polyhouse farmers was high cost of seed and least was less availability of skilled labour. In case of open field farmers, high market price fluctuation was major problem and lack of transportation facility was reported least by respondents.