Oil Mallee Farming Optimization Problem
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Farmer Joe is considering plant mallees (a type of eucalyptus) on part of his 90 hectares of land. Wheat profits is $120/ha, while mallee profit is $90/ha. He also knows that mallees will cost him 2 days of work/ha, while wheat costs 3 days/ha. He is a profit-maximizing farmer who has a maximum of 180 working days available (labor constraint).
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Contributed by: Marit Kragt and Zhengqiang Jiang (September 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Details
The problem setup is where is wheat area and is the Mallee area:
Maximize
subject to:
X1≤40 ha;&IndentingNewLine;X1+X2≤90 ha;
;
.
This problem is based on real-life decision problems that farmers in Western Australia have to make. Oil mallee farming is emerging as a potential addition to dry-land agriculture systems. Planting mallees can generate income from carbon credits, from biofuels, and may also come with additional environmental benefits that improve farming practice.
Of course, the on-farm economics is very important to landholders when they decide whether to plant mallees or not, because there are costs associated with the initial plantings and they essentially take cropping land out of production.
For more information, see http://www.oilmallee.org.au/
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