THE IMPACT OF IMPLEMENTATION OF LAND IMPROVEMENT AND MAINTENANCE PROGRAMS ON WHEAT PRODUCTIVITY AND ECONOMICS IN KAFR EL-SHEIKH GOVERNORATE

Agricultural land resources are considered the most important factors of agricultural production and are increasingly important in countries with limited land resources, as in the case of Egypt in addition to what has happened in recent years of increasing encroachment on agricultural lands. On the other hand, agricultural strategies that seeks to increase agricultural land, and cultivated by strategic crops. The wheat crop in Egypt is considered one of the main crops, where the Egyptian citizen relies on it for his basic food. The wheat grains are used in the production of bread, pasta, pies and sweets. Wheat straw is used as a fodder for farm animals and it is used in some wood industries. As a result of the steady increase in population and insufficient domestic production of wheat, there is a large gap between local production and consumption of the population.so Egypt must be imported large amounts of wheat to meet the consumption of local market.
        The problem of this research is the decrease productivity of wheat crop in Kafr El-Sheikh Gover-
norate and decrease in the net income of wheat cultivation in Kafr El-Sheikh governorate, which led to reluctance of many farmers to grow wheat crop. Where the area of wheat grown in the governorate decreased from about  229.10  thousand feddans in 2005/2006 to about 216.7 thousand feddans in 2014/2015 with a decrease of 5.4%.
                The study aims to study the effect of improvement and maintenance programs of agricultural lands on productivity of wheat crops in Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate, 2015-2016, which helps farmers and decision-makers to increase the agricultural land area for improvement and conservation programs.
                One of the most important results was that all improvement processes resulted in an increase in the net yield of wheat crop, where all the measurements of the dummy variables were positively related and proved to be statistical significance.             The results of analysis of variance showed the importance effect of usage agricultural land improvement and maintenance programs on increasing the net income of wheat. It is also estimated that the net income increases when more than one improvement program is used. Improvement processes, which reflects the nature of the quality of agricultural land in the governorate, which is characterized by heavy clay soil.