Decision Tool for Growers to Evaluate Economic Impact of Grafting Technology Adoption: An Application to Open-field Conventional Tomato Production Olya Rysin 1,3 and Frank J. Louws 2 ADDITIONAL INDEX WORDS. enterprise budgets, Solanum lycopersicum, sensitivity analysis SUMMARY. Grafting could potentially become an important part of integrated pest management programs in vegetable crops in the United States due to increased pathogen densities, reliance on pathogen susceptible varieties, increased use of organic and high tunnel production systems, limited land or input resources, value- added benefits, and the loss of, or regulatory restrictions on, soil fumigants. Adoption of this technology imposes additional costs on growers due to signifi- cantly higher grafted transplant prices, but associated yield improvements are potentially more than sufficient to offset the higher transplant costs. Therefore, the economic impact of the technology adoption depends highly on the specific circumstances of each grower. In this study, we propose a decision tool for growers to facilitate grafting technology adoption. We demonstrate an application of the proposed tool to a scenario based on real-life data for the open-field production of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). The results show that based on a 30% loss in marketable yields due to disease pressure in nongrafted systems, yield improvements in the grafted system with resistant rootstock were sufficient to offset higher transplant and harvesting costs and resulted in higher net revenues. Net revenue estimates were $7126/acre in the nongrafted system and $8374/acre in the grafted system. The sensitivity analysis resulted in positive net revenues in the grafted system ranging from $108 to $12,328 per acre. Estimated marketable yield required in the grafted system to breakeven with the nongrafted system was 73,880 or 19,980 lb/acre more than marketable yield in the nongrafted system. G rafting of fruiting vegetables was recorded as early as fifth century (Lee and Oda, 2003) and again introduced in the early 1900s (Lee et al., 2010). The method has been extensively adapted in Japan and Korea in the last 30 years and more recently in Western countries (Kubota et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2010). Vegetable grafting is now widespread in Asia and Europe and in protected culture systems in North America. Worldwide, com- monly grafted vegetables include water- melon (Citrullus lanatus ), tomato, eggplant (Solanum melongena), cucum- ber (Cucumis sativus ), and pepper (Capsicum sp.). Grafting is still rare in U.S. field production systems due to the high cost of grafted transplants, lack of reliable information regarding benefits and limited access to large number of grafted transplants (Barrett et al., 2012; King at al., 2010; Kubota et al., 2008; Taylor et al., 2008). Currently, large-scale propaga- tors of grafted transplants catering to commercial growers in the United States are located mainly in Canada and focus on plants for protected culture (Kubota et al., 2008). The current capacity to produce large quantities of grafted plants is low in the United States, and many organic and small-acreage growers with green- house operations do their own grafting because there is no local propagator available (Kubota et al., 2008). How- ever, the number and size of commercial vegetable transplant producers is growing in the United States as a re- sult of greater demand for grafted transplants of high quality and better performance (Lee et al., 2010). This growth is complemented by invest- ments of multinational seed compa- nies to develop and distribute seeds for grafting. Current trends include breeding very specific superior root- stock for vegetables grown under specific conditions and environments (Lee et al., 2010), and growers prefer to purchase grafted seedlings from commercial nurseries rather than pro- duce their own. Producers rely on using specific rootstocks primarily to manage vari- ous soilborne pathogens in successive cropping systems (King et al., 2010; Kubota et al., 2008; McAvoy et al., 2012; Rivard and Louws, 2008; Rivard et al., 2010a). Currently, there are commercially available rootstocks Units To convert U.S. to SI, multiply by U.S. unit SI unit To convert SI to U.S., multiply by 0.4047 acre(s) ha 2.4711 0.3048 ft m 3.2808 0.4536 lb kg 2.2046 1.1209 lb/acre kgha –1 0.8922 Production and Marketing Reports The funding was provided by USDA SCRI Project No. 2011-51181-30963. The authors would sincerely like to thank the re- viewers of this article for their helpful comments. 1 Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695 2 NSF-Center for IPM and Department of Plant Pathol- ogy, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695 3 Corresponding author. E-mail: obsydoro@ncsu.edu. 132 • February 2015 25(1)