Economic Evaluation of Drought Resistance Measures for Maize Seed Production Based on TOPSIS Model and Combination Weighting Optimization

Abstract

In order to optimize the appropriate drought resistance measures in the implementation of high-efficiency and intensive production of maize seed, in 2018 and 2019, maize cultivation experiments with different drought resistance measures were carried out in the arid area of northwest China, including water retention agent (SA), white plastic film mulch (WF), black plastic film mulch (BF), straw mulch (SM), and open ground flat seed as control (CK). A total of five treatments were conducted. Ten specific indicators contained four types of attributes, namely the yield, quality, water use efficiency (WUE), and economic benefit of maize seed production, aimed at constructing a multilevel evaluation system. To improve the reliability of evaluation results, subjective and objective weights of indexes were calculated using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight method (EWM), respectively. Then, based on the integrated weighting method of game theory (GT), the combined weights of subjective and objective unity were obtained. Finally, with the help of the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), a comprehensive benefit evaluation model was established to screen out the optimal drought resistance measures. Compared with CK, different drought resistance measures significantly improved the grain quality of seeds-production corn, and the average annual yield and WUE of black and white film treatments were improved by 49.57% and 42.97% and by 65.67% and 58.21%, respectively. This proved that black film mulching (BF) could significantly increase the yield and WUE of maize seed production and effectively improve grain quality, which could be used as the best drought-resistant cultivation mode for maize seed planting in Hexi and similar areas.