A Study On The Energy Use And Energy Efficiency Of Grain Production

The steady growth in food production to ensure national food security is one of the main objectives in the long agricultural and economic development. With the continuous improvement of China's grain production capacity, the high energy-consuming material inputs including fertilizers, pesticides, electricity and agricultural diesel oil also increased significantly. On the background that energy gap and dependence on foreign countries are increasing in China's rapid economic development, how to reduce energy consumption in the agricultural and food production and improve energy efficiency are of great practical significance to the sustainable development of modern agriculture China will achieve and promotion of agricultural energy reduction in the grain production.Based on reviewing systematically the methods of estimation of agricultural energy use, taking rice, wheat and maize, three main varieties of grain, for example, employing the input and output data of grain production between 2004 and 2008, this article calculated scientifically the energy use of the grain production in the different grain-producing areas, and estimated the energy efficiency of wheat and maize production, then discussed the regional differences of energy efficiency in the grain production.This article consisted of six chapters. The first chapter described the background, significance of this study, research objectives and content, research methods, technical routes and data and sources, and gave innovation and limitation of this article a detailed description also.In Chapter 2, based on a more comprehensive review of domestic and foreign research results, and collation and analysis of the forms of energy consumption as well as their methods of estimation in the agricultural production, the general index system of energy efficiency, including the single-factor energy efficiency and the total-factor energy efficiency, was brought forward. Chapter 3 described and analyzed the development of three main crop production of rice, wheat and corn, then on the national level, elaborated the changes of the energy input in the grain production. In the forth chapter, the econometric methods of the energy-cost material, including fertilizers, pesticides, electricity and diesel oil, was proposed, and the direct energy use of rice, wheat and maize production was estimated. Then from the two dimensions of the unit area and the unit output, the differences of energy use of the grain production in different regions was compared, and the total energy use of the three main crops was calculated. In Chapter 5, based on putting forward DEA method calculating the total-factor energy efficiency, this article estimated the energy efficiency of wheat and maize production, and discussed the changes of their energy efficiency from two different perspectives of time and area. Last chapter summarized the main conclusions of this study, and the main issues of concern of follow-up study were presented further.