ECONOMICS OF MANGO GROWING IN PUNJAB

Mango cultivation has distinguished characteristics from growing other major crops like wheat, cotton, sugarcane, etc. in the sense that the former continues to produce output for a longer period of time. Therefore, cost of production and returns are estimated in different ways compared to annual crops. The present study has been designed to investigate cost of production, and returns per acre over the life time of mango trees. A sample of 20 mango growing farmers was taken purposely from various villages of Multan district. The objective was to work out Cost benefit ratio and net present worth of growing mango orchard. Net present worth of Rs. 155607.16 per acre was estimated for the sampled respondents which indicate that mango cultivation fetches higher returns whereas Cost benefit ratio is reasonably high and it came to be 2.61 implying that investing one rupee in mango cultivation would return Rs. 2.61. These results indicate that investing in mango orchard would bring huge returns to the farmers on one hand and for the country in the form of foreign earnings on the other hand.