Agriculture
Skip Navigation Links With an agricultural enterprise, the objective is to allocate scarce resources to their most profitable use. Those resources primarily will include land, water, equipment and cash. The decision to plant a crop on an acre of land involves a number of considerations. The particular soil characteristics, and associated yield expected, the contracted or expected market price, the amount of water, equipment and cash required for fertilizer pest control, and labor should all be considered. Complicating matters are the crop rotational issues. With multi-year crops, and rotation constraints, a planting program should be analyzed over a several year planning horizon. Integrated operations such as the dairy farm, must consider the integrated benefit of growing feed crops vs. growing cash crops. Managing the farm is full of tradeoffs. If an acre is used to grow wheat, it can’t be used that year to grow barley. As farm managers, we intuitively cast this logic mentally, when allocating resources, particularly land and water. An optimization model is setup to "think" in the same manner and the computer helps us to solve for the best combination of farm enterprises that yields the greatest profit.
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