Avaliação técnica e econômica do uso de sementes de soja no Rio Grande do Sul.

Abstract

The aim was to evaluate the performance of saved and commercial soybean seeds and their technical and economic impacts. Five experiments were performed in the State of Rio Grande do Sul using saved and commercial seeds where the seed quality, plant stand, percentage of doubles and skips, percentage of the area with skips, coefficient of variation of spacings, precision index and yield were evaluated. From the results the return on investment, the increase in income, total production, economic added value, job positions, ICMS (sales and services tax) and total taxes collected and the increase in the values generated by the forward linkage of agriculture, forestry and lumbering for the economies of the State of Rio Grande do Sul and for Brazil were calculated. Commercial seeds tend to present greater plant stand and percentage of doubles and lower skip and skip area percentages. The coefficient of variation of spacings and precision index were not effective in detecting differences in physical and physiological quality of seed lots. Commercial seeds tend to present greater yield where the mean difference between commercial seeds under industrial seed treatment and saved seeds under ‘On Farm’ seed treatment was of 295 kg ha-1. Regarding the economic impacts, there was an increase in income of R$1.03 billion and a return on investment was of 7.04. The total benefits calculated for the Brazilian economy were of R$1.594 billion in total production, R$763.2 million in the added value, 39.6 thousand job positions, R$330.7 million in income, R$86 million in ICMS and of total taxes collected and of R$4.1 billion in the forward linkage of the agriculture, forestry and lumbering sector. Commercial seeds increase grain yield and the income of farmers, have a high return on investment and significant benefits for the economy.