Economic Assessment Of Cereal Residue Harvest And Transport Systems In Relation To The Distance Between The Field And The Storage Centre

The work has been developed under the AGROinLOG Project, aimed at demonstrating the technical, environmental and economic feasibility of Integrated Biomass Logistics Centres (IBLC) for food and non-food products. The goal of the project is to give support to one of the agroindustries selected in the Project, dehydrating facility, to build an IBLC extending the utilization of their equipment used for regular activity to new business chain based on the valorisation of agricultural residues, cereal straw and maize stalks. In particular, the purpose of this work is to evaluate the maximum distance between the fields and the storage centre from which it is more economically convenient to gather the biomass with balers instead of forage hauling equipment, regularly utilized in their activity. To this aim the performance of the machines (working times, yield and material losses) and fuel consumption in each operation (harvesting, loading, transport and unloading) of both yards have been evaluated. With the data collected in field, machine costs analysis was performed. The total costs per ton of biomass harvested ((sic) t(-1)) are about 59% higher for baling system and from the analysis of unitary transport costs, resulted a cost per ton per km three times higher when the biomass is transported with the self-loading wagon.