Paper Title
Assessing the Economic Feasibility of Selective Crop-Related Technological Products at Farm Level–A South African Case Study

Abstract
Long-term research, supplemented by the more recent Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), consistently presents farmers with a magnitude of valuable new technologies to be considered for implementation in a farming business. This paper presents an assessment of the potential effect on farm profitability when the application of some of agricultural technologies is considered. In most countries, legal obligations require external auditing of a farming business (e.g. a company), thus farmers are annually presented with audited financial statements for their business sometime after the end of their financial year. Although these statements provide an indication of total farm profitability (after all costs have been considered), it usually does not provide an indication of the profitability of individual enterprises on a farm. When new technologies have been implemented during the most recent financial year, the change in farm profit (compared to previous years) may only be partially attributed to the impact of the particular new technology implemented due to the numerous other factors (e.g. variable climate and -prices) that may have influenced farm profitability during that year/season. To determine the net value (profit) of a technology (as an alternative scenario to the status quo), it is required that a farmer compile a detailed enterprise budget to the level of “Margin over allocated costs” for both scenarios, thus the potential income for 1) the current practice and 2) the alternative technology, but inclusive of the respective fixed- (capital) and variable (operational) costs for both scenarios. In this paper a case study whereby substituting a BR white maize cultivar with a newly developed hybrid conventional (non-GMO)cultivar is considered, illustrating not only the difference in pesticides applied, but also the associated cultivation costs. A sensitivity analysis indicates the potential price that the farmer must realise for the non-GM maize to break even with the BR cultivar. Without this detailed analysis, it is impossible to make an informed decision on the financial implication of implementing any new/alternative technology on a particular farm. Keywords – Agricultural Technology, Financial Assessment, Enterprise budget, non-GMO maize, Parametric analysis.