Crop production scheduling for revenue inequality reduction among smallholder farmers in an agricultural cooperative

Abstract

In this paper, a crop production schedule for a cooperative is determined considering a social objective of similar revenues for all smallholder farmer members. The problem involves multiple crops, multiple smallholder farmers, and multiple periods. The current planning is performed manually and results in haphazard amounts of revenue per farmer. A priority-based max-min heuristic (PMMH) is proposed to solve this problem. A social objective of the PMMH is to minimise the standard deviation of the revenue per greenhouse. The proposed heuristic reduces this standard deviation in the solution by reallocating crops among the greenhouses of the farmers, especially those farmers with very high or very low revenues. The PMMH is tested on various problem scenarios. The solutions obtained with the PMMH provide better objective function values than those from What’s Best solver. The results also show that the revenue per greenhouse is affected by the number of greenhouses per farmer.

Keywords:

• Crop production scheduling
• heuristic
• revenue inequality reduction
• smallholder farmers

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the editor and anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their thorough reading, thoughtful comments, and useful suggestions. We would like to also thank the Royal Project Foundation for the data and collaboration in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the KMUTT Petchra Pra Jom Klao Doctoral Scholarship (3/2558).