| In this paper we examine whether there is room for improvement in farm program decisions through the integration of formal mathematical optimisation into the planning process. Probing the potential for improvement, we investigate the cases of four Brandenburg cash crop farms over the last six years. We find that their total gross margins could have been increased significantly through a more sophisticated program planning. However, we also find that the superiority of formalised planning approaches depends on the quality of the data. The superior formal planning approach includes, in contrast to farmers’ ad hoc planning, a systematic time series analysis of gross margins and a stochastic optimisation model. For each of the six years, the formal planning... |
