Vincent de Leijster

71 Almond farm profitability under agroecological management 4 Figure 4-1. Treatment specific costs, benefits and net revenue of an average operational year of almond production. Treatments include: conventional tillage (CT), no tillage (NT), green manure (GM), compost (CM). Green colored bars indicate gross revenues, red bars with numbers costs and blue bars net revenues. 4.3.2 Long-term economic performance On the long-term, the CM treatment was the most profitable as it provided a 17.2% higher NPV than CT. Although CM required larger investment costs (Figure 4-2), the DPBT was similar to CT amounting to 11.7-11.9 years (Table 4-3). NT resulted in the lowest NPV, followed by GM, which were 90.1% and 69.0% lower than CT, respectively. The DPBT for these treatments was also 6.1-10.4 years longer (DPBT of 22 years for NT and 18 years for GM). In terms of IRR the treatments followed the same order (Table 4-3). The sensitivity analysis showed that there was no interaction effect between management regimes and discount rates, and that NPV values were positive for each discount rate scenario, indicating that all treatments were profitable in the given settings (Appendix Table A4-6).