Balance Energia Calabaza

Journal of Agricultural Science and Applications (JASA)

Energy Balance on Pumpkin Seed Production
Haydar Hacıseferoğulları1, Mustafa Acaroğlu2
1,2

Department of Farm Machinery, Faculty of Agriculture, Selçuk University, Konya, Turkey 2 acaroglu@selcuk.edu.tr The oil content of pumpkin seed determined about 45% on dry weight basis. This may result in lower operation costs compared to someother oilseeds, for instance soybeans (20%) and cottonseeds (14%). Lower operation costs result from higher oil percentage mainly due to less capacity needed for the extruder and oilseed press. New low-cost oil crops are needed to produce economical oils suitable for biodiesel production. One of the possible alternative oil crops is pumpkin seed [8]. In addition, studies are determined onphysicochemical and antioxidant properties, lipoxygenase inhibition activity, carotenoids of pumpkin seed oil, recently [9, 10, 11] . Energy in agriculture is important in terms of crop production and agricultural processing for value adding. Energy indicators depict the efficiency of production system but also allow comparison of different production intensities [12] , and, therefore, are a suitablesupplement to economic analyses [13]. The input and output of energy are two important factors for determining the energetic and ecological efficiency of crop production. The energy analysis is important to ascertain more efficient and environment friendly production systems [13, 14]. Energy requirements in agriculture are divided into two groups: being direct and being indirect. Direct energy isrequired to perform various tasks related to crop production processes such as land preparation; irrigation, threshing, harvesting, and transportation of agricultural inputs and farm produce [15]. It is seen that direct energy is directly used at farms and on fields. Indirect energy, on the other hand, consists of energy used in the manufacture, packaging, and transport of fertilizers, pesticides, andfarm machinery [16, 17]. As the name implies, indirect energy is not directly used on the farm. Major items for indirect energy are fertilizers, seeds, machinery production, and pesticides [18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24]. A significant objective in agricultural production is to decrease costs and increase yield. In this respect, the energy budget is important. Energy budget is the numericalcomparison of the relationship between input and output of an agricultural system in terms of energy units. Pumpkin seeds production is significant economically for Turkish business and growers. The aim of this study is to provide a descriptive analysis of energy use in pumpkin seed. II. MATERIALS AND METHODS It was given phases of using mechanization in pumpkin seed production and used machinery andtools in the experiments in Table Ⅰ. A s it is shown, thinning, harvesting, drying, spreading, mixing, and sacking were done by labor force. The study was conducted in Cumra district of Konya Province, Turkey in 2005. Soil type of field was loam and structural properties were 17% clay, 32% silt and 51% sandy.

Abstract-Energy budget is a significant setter on evaluation and comparison of productionmethods. Pumpkin seed is a good source of income for growers in Turkey. In this study, energy balance of pumpkin seed production was determined using conventional agricultural systems. Pumpkin seed oil was calculated as 200 kg/ha from pumpkin seed yield (1 t/ha). According to data, total energy input, total energy output and ratio of output/input were determined as 10973.19 MJ/ha, 10045.06 MJ/haand 0.915, respectively. The biggest energy input, fuel-oil (30.94%) and the lowest energy input, labor (1.27%) and in fuel and oil energy input, soil tillage by plough, trashing, hoeing and seed bed preparation values were obtained as 26.06%, 18.63%, 19.81%, and 12.94%, respectively. Obtaining results are the new data on energy balance of pumpkin seeds. Keywords-Biomass; Energy Balance; Pumpkin...