AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE OPTIMIZATION BY FARMS BASED ON QUALITY MANAGEMENT: LINES OF RESEARCH

The paper is aimed at justifying the need for having an increased focus on quality issues in agriculture, as well as developing a scientific approach to optimizing the agricultural land-use by farms based on quality management. With this aim in mind, the authors successively solve two problems. The first problem is associated with the study of the impact of fertilizer application on the efficiency of agricultural land-use and on the quality of agricultural products. The second problem consists in providing operational recommendations for the optimization of agricultural land use by farms based on quality management in order to simultaneously solve the problem of ensuring food security as well as the problem of rural development (on the basis of improvement of farm business performance). The authors have considered a science-based approach towards the land use optimization by farms with the most effective application of fertilizers in a certain scientifically based crop rotation system which gives the maximum profit per hectare of arable land used by basic regional crops - fall rye, barley and potato; besides, this approach ensures their high quality. Following the results of the study, it has been concluded that application of mineral fertilizers is a powerful factor contributing to the improvement of the quality of agricultural products through increasing their micronutrient content and ensuring their safety. Therefore, an increase in application of mineral fertilizers is fundamental for the proposed scientific approach to optimizing the agricultural land use by farms based on quality management.