Operations Research Techniques in Farm Management: Survey and Appraisal

daries of his field and concluded that there were three kinds of research-fundamental, applied, and operational, with the last being the domain of OR [40, p. 241]. If we were to accept this view of OR my comments would be virtually at an end at this point. There has been scarcely enough application of OR techniques to solving operating problems on farms to warrant serious discussion.' In actual practice, OR has changed its character somewhat and is obviously less and less devoted to solving operating problems, and more and more given to technique development and to solution of problems of general interest [3, 60]. In other words, it has expanded from its operational base to include applied research of the type typical of academic farm-management efforts. Since OR has not made any substantial change in our professional point of view, I will review applications that have been made in recent years to ordinary farm-management problems. I will exclude from consideration those works that are not primarily directed toward application at the farm level.