**4. Conclusions**

This study aimed to contribute to filling the gap in the scientific literature about the technical-economic analysis of conservation agriculture approaches in paddy rice cultivation, compared with conventional practices. With a comparative experiment based on direct field measurements of data about machinery and production factors used, the analysis showed that the adoption of conservative techniques for paddy rice cultivation allowed significant savings on production costs, thanks to reduced work time (47%–61% less) and to lower mechanization costs (42%–58% less) in comparison to conventional practices. Moreover, the reduction found in fuel consumption (48%–63% less) with the associated reduction of emissions can also be related to the direct environmental benefits.

**Author Contributions:** Conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, collected and analyzed the data, interpreted the results and developed the manuscript, A.C.; conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, collected and analyzed the data, interpreted the results and developed the manuscript, R.O.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding. **Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to acknowledge the Azienda Agricola Sgariboldi (Torrevecchia Pia, Pavia, Italy) for hosting the field tests.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
