A crop plan, an obligation which makes agricultural sense

The Agricultural Land Protection Regulation launched last week by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights, Anton Refalo includes an obligation for Maltese farmers to submit a crop plan. The establishment of a crop plan can be seen as an additional administrative burden but in reality, it can present different advantages beyond a simple planification, especially for a country like Malta.

If we go back to the basics, any agricultural holding, as any other business, is impacted by its revenues and its costs. As revenues are essentially influenced by the market itself, only operational costs can in practice be compressed. Now comes the following question: How could a Maltese farmer, who cannot play on the economy of scale due to relatively small holdings, compress these costs with a crop plan?

Operational costs, besides the seeds and the actual work force, include in general plant protection products, fertilisers and water. Their prices also fluctuate according to the market, but it is possible to compress their costs by reducing the use of such products by crop rotation and implementing a crop plan.

The idea of a crop plan aims to associate at the same time or/and by rotation, plants that are compatible with each other in terms of pest management and nitrogen input while optimising water management. In fact, the more efficient your crop plan will be, the less interventions are needed on your crop and the more you will be able to compress your costs and boost the profitability of your agricultural holding.

It is therefore in every farmer’s interest to establish and implement a crop plan that will help on the one hand to improve the soil quality and the biodiversity of the agricultural holding, and on the other hand to reduce operational costs and to increase profits in order to sustain their agricultural activities on the long term.