Performance of Sugarcane Cultivation in Thiuvannamalai District of Tamil Nadu, India - A Socio-economic Analysis

The core objective of the study is to analyze the performance of sugarcane in terms of cost and returns and resource use efficiency. A sample of 30 Sugarcane growing farmers purposively selected at random from the Vazhavachannur and Perunduraipattu villages of Thandrampattu block of Tiruvannamalai District. Since all the sugarcane farmers use the same cultivation practices, 30 sample farmers are sufficient to represent the entire sugarcane farmers of the study area. Tools like simple average and percentage analyses were used to examine cost of cultivation, labour hours used, quantity of materials used and machine hours used by farmers in each crop production. Regression analysis was employed to measure the influence of selected explanatory variables on independent variables. Result showed that joint family constitutes about 33.00 percent and nuclear family was 67 of the total sample households. Average size of holding is 3.28 acre. Total cost of cultivation for groundnut is Rs.59376.64/acre. Gross income from groundnut is Rs.140962.50/acre. Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) of groundnut cultivation is 2.37. All the sample farmers wholly depend on the sugarcane cooperatives for selling their produce. The human labors were used for Inter cultural operation, sowing & transplanting, chemicals, fertilizer and Farm Yard Manure (FYM). FYM, chemicals, fertilizer and seed are the major inputs used in crop production. Bund Former and Rotavator is the machines used for crop production. About 89.00 percent of variation in dependent variables explained by the selected independent variables such as quantity of chemicals and labor hours for inter cultural operation.