Sustainable New Agricultural Technology – Economic Aspects of Precision Crop Protection

The sustainable development can be interpreted in many aspects. The Earth's growing population, the efficient use of land, as a limit resource is both requiring the practical application of production technology, like precision farming. Innovation in agriculture ensures the wide-spread use of the latest, up-to-date technology, but it is still evolving and boarding. It is a fact that not every farm can implement precision crop production into practice, it depends on their size, production structure, technical level/equipment and finally on the labour skills. In this study we have examined why is so slow its diffusion besides the provenenvironmental benefits and real economic benefits is. Crop production has evolving role in Hungary and in Romania. With model calculation we have estimated the economic relations between potential savings in pests on EU level. It has been found that after switching to precision weed management, the savings in pesticide use can be 30 thousand tons (calculating with the current dose-level in the EU-27) in an optimistic scenario. If approximately 30% of the crop producing and mixed farms over 16 ESU adopt this new technology, this will diminish environmental loads by up to 10-35%.