Collaboration and optimization in farmland exchangesShow others and affiliations
2023 (English)In: International Transactions in Operational Research, ISSN 0969-6016, E-ISSN 1475-3995, Vol. 30, no 4, p. 1591-1616Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
To keep businesses competitive in world markets, the number of farms in most countries is decreasing while farm size is increasing, and parcels making up the farm area are extremely fragmented. It is common for farms to expand faster than available arable land near the farm center, leading to longer distances between the farm center and field areas. Consequently, logistic costs increase and affect the farm's profitability and the environment. Moreover, there is often substantial overlap between different farms, which implies that it is possible for farmers to collaborate with each other. We developed and proposed three optimization models to describe different levels of collaboration and sharing restrictions. Many practical considerations need to be weighed, such as the soil type and crops used. We collected detailed information on farms, parcels, and cost drivers in seven large instances for our case study in Sweden. One instance had 1431 farms and 32,091 parcels with 96 crop types. The resulting optimization models were very large; special pre-processing and optimization techniques were developed for their solutions. The theoretical potential for collaboration in logistic cost reduction was very large, ranging from approximately 10% to 50% depending on the form of the collaboration. Because a large part of costs comes from less use of diesel for transport resources, the reduction in cost is directly related to a reduction in CO2 emissions. © 2022 The Authors. International Transactions in Operational Research
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
John Wiley and Sons Inc , 2023. Vol. 30, no 4, p. 1591-1616
Keywords [en]
agriculture, environment, integer programming, land development, logistics, natural resources, practice of OR, Cost reduction, Crops, International trade, % reductions, Arable land, Farm size, Integer Program- ming, Logistic costs, Optimisations, World market
National Category
Energy Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-59250DOI: 10.1111/itor.13145Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85128655560OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-59250DiVA, id: diva2:1660270
2022-05-232022-05-232024-03-15Bibliographically approved