SPATIAL VARIABILITY OF PROFITABILITY, HARVEST LOSSES AND PRODUCTIVITY OF BEANS

Common bean is grown in all regions of Brazil and has an economic and social importance. It is a subsistente crop on small farms, however, there are some problems affecting its marketing, such as fluctuation of prices paid to producers. The harvesting methods are diverse and currently the most widely used in Brazil is the semi-mechanized one. In order to evaluate productivity, profitability, manual and mechanical losses of Juriti beans cultivar, it was carried out a survey of georeferenced data in an area of 10.50 ha, with a 50 x 50 m grid of regular sampling. To study the spatial variability, geostatistics techniques were used to draw thematic maps by kriging techniques. It was found out that for the 2005/2006 crop, the average productivity in this area was 6.77% higher than the regional average, reported by the SEAB in Parana. At harvest, the manual losses were lower (1.49%) than the mechanical (8.73%), and these, when added together, represented a total loss of 10.22% of average productivity. According to the maps, it was possible to identify the spatial distribution of variables across the studied area and register that there was a loss in 35.91% of cultivated area, which means that the beans sale profitability was less than the production cost, caused mainly by the low yield of this crop. Such information is important so that farmers know their acreage, as well as evaluate, by the profitability map, if eventually, any other crop would have a better return per area.