per hectare (per ha)
Also known as: /ha · yield per hectare
A unit of measurement expressing agricultural yield, input use, or economic value on a land area basis — hectares are the standard area unit in Indian and international farming contexts.
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What is per hectare?
Per hectare is the standard unit denominator used to express agricultural yields, input intensity, productivity benchmarks, and economic indicators on a land-area basis. One hectare equals 10,000 square metres, 2.471 acres, or 100 metres by 100 metres — a square plot slightly larger than a standard FIFA football pitch. The hectare is the unit officially adopted by the Indian Bureau of Agricultural Statistics, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and the Bureau of Indian Standards for cropping intensity, fertiliser dosing, and irrigation reporting, replacing older measures like the bigha, which varies regionally from 0.13 to 0.4 hectares.
In bioenergy and organic farming contexts, per-hectare metrics anchor four critical decisions. First, feedstock yield — Napier grass at 80–200 tonnes per hectare per year, paddy straw at 4–6 t/ha, sugarcane at 70–90 t/ha — defines the land area needed to supply a given plant capacity. Second, input requirements — nitrogen at 80–120 kg/ha for cereals, irrigation at 4,000–8,000 m3/ha for rice — drive operational cost models. Third, economic productivity, expressed as gross margin per hectare, allows direct comparison between cropping choices and between farms. Fourth, environmental indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions, water footprint, and pesticide intensity are normalised to hectare to compare practices and certification standards.
For an Indian CBG plant developer, the per-hectare arithmetic is decisive. A 10 tonne-per-day CBG plant running on Napier grass at 150 t/ha/year requires roughly 25 hectares of dedicated plantation under continuous cropping, plus a 20% buffer for failed cuts and rotation. The same plant running on paddy straw at 5 t/ha would notionally need 700 hectares of paddy fields within the collection radius — a fundamentally different feedstock logistics problem. Per-hectare data, sourced from ICAR's All India Coordinated Research Projects and state agricultural universities, forms the empirical foundation of every feedstock supply plan.
Common questions about per hectare
Plain-English answers to what people most often ask.
How many bighas are in one hectare?
Why is hectare the standard unit in agricultural reports rather than acres?
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