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

• Main Authors: BOYABATLI, Onur, NASIRY, Javad, ZHOU, Yangfang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Farm planning; Crop rotation; Agriculture; Commodity; Uncertainty; Dynamic programming; Corn; Soybean; Agribusiness; Operations and Supply Chain Management
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6938
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.