Land use optimization with respect to alternative costs of crop production choices – case of Slovakia

The dominated agricultural sector in Slovakia is crop production. The major part of arable land is devoted to the cultivation of cereals (57%), followed by feed crops (20%) and industry crops (19%). There is possible to identify 4 agricultural production areas, all with different soil conditions, altitude and structure of cultivated crops. Aim of this paper is to identify the optimal land allocation within the each production area among the selected major crops cultivated in Slovakia. Furthermore it deals with modelling the production potentials with respect to policy programmes and production choices aimed on improvement of profitability in less-favoured areas. Objective is to provide land use alternative for each production area in order to maximize profit. The results suggest that the mountains areas have potentials to produce and supply feed crops, while lowlands are favourable for diverse crop production.