Dynamic crop allocation in the presence of two-season crop rotation benefits

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

10-2021

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is twofold. First, to study how a farmer should dynamically allocate farmland between two crops when the crops have rotation benefits across growing seasons, i.e., when it is more profitable to grow a crop on rotated farmland (where the other crop was grown) than on non-rotated farmland (where the same crop was grown). Second, to develop a practically implementable heuristic allocation policy and examine its performance in comparison with other heuristic policies commonly suggested in the literature. While the chapter is based on our companion paper (Boyabatlı et al (Management Sci 65(5):2060–2076, 2019)), we characterize the optimal dynamic allocation policy in a more general setting where the rotation benefits carry through for two growing seasons. To propose a heuristic allocation policy we focus on a special case of our model where the rotation benefits carry through for one growing season, as in our companion paper. We propose a one-period lookahead policy, which we can characterize in closed form based on the optimal policy structure and examine its performance in a numerical study with models calibrated to data obtained from United States Department of Agriculture and extant resources. We show that our proposed one-period lookahead policy outperforms all other heuristic policies and provides a near-optimal performance.

Keywords

Farm planning, Crop rotation, Agriculture, Commodity, Uncertainty, Dynamic programming, Corn, Soybean

Discipline

Agribusiness | Operations and Supply Chain Management

Research Areas

Operations Management

Publication

Agricultural supply chain management research

Volume

12

Editor

Onur Boyabatlı, Burak Kazaz, & Christopher S. Tang

First Page

3

Last Page

20

ISBN

9783030814236

Identifier

10.1007/978-3-030-81423-6_1

Publisher

Springer

City or Country

Cham

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81423-6_1

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS