The dynamic programming approach to long term production planning in agriculture

Abstract

The production planning in agriculture is one of the most important decision problems of the farmer. Although some decision support tools based mainly on linear programming and addressed to agriculture authorities were presented, their direct application by a farmer is not possible. This is mainly due to the local character of the models developed for particular agricultural conditions and also due to the complexness of underlying mathematical programming models.This paper aims to develop dynamic programming model for the long run crop plan optimization covering the typical conditions of Czech farms, which could serve as a platform for further enlargements and changes according to needs and conditions of particular farm. The dynamic programming algorithm is developed in detail for model case of four areas to be planted by four crops each year. The possibility of covering different constraints by generating the state space is discussed, and the generating procedure for crop rotation rules is shown. The goal function reflects the farmers objective of profit maximization and it is defined with respect to harvests’ randomness. The case study is solved for the data from South Moravian agriculture cooperative and the optimal solution is presented and discussed.

Keywords

• production planning
• MATLAB algorithm
• crop rotation
• dynamic programming