Feature Article—Mathematical Models in Farm Planning: A Survey

Farm planning has increased in complexity and importance as agriculture in the developed world has become concentrated in larger, more specialized farm units. These changes have stimulated the development of formal planning techniques based on mathematical models. Although this approach is characteristic of operations research, the profession's direct involvement in agricultural planning has been limited: much of the published work is associated with agricultural economics. In this paper, we provide an OR-oriented introduction to the problems involved in agricultural planning, particularly at the farm level. We describe the planning problems of both the crop and livestock sectors and outline the models that have been proposed for solving these problems. Researchers, and agricultural extension and advisory services, have been the main users of these models, but the widespread availability of microcomputers gives considerable scope for developing models for use by farmers.