An integrated sizing and planning problem in designing diverse vegetable farming systems

Abstract

To support the short food supply chain development in cities, we propose a diverse vegetable farm design model to maximise the farm revenue in response to clients' daily demands in local fresh fruits and vegetables. The model supports decision in creating or adapting farms within or around cities with viable business models. To the best of our knowledge, our model is a first attempt to integrate strategic and tactical decisions on multi-techniques, multi-products and multi-clients production systems. Integrating strategic and tactical decisions, we obtain new solutions that could not be obtained by separating the two decision levels, due to product short-time perishability constraints: on-plot and cold-room storage, loss functions and price reduction. We define a specific formulation of the production methods in the model to consider both cultivation and harvest tasks that compete for limited and expensive labour resource. This paper presents the mixed integer linear programme we develop, as well as graphical and computational results. We have been able to find relevant solutions on a real farm case study that demonstrates the interest of using short time-paces for the strategic sizing of a farm growing fresh perishable products.

Keywords:

• operational research
• capacitated lot-sizing
• resource allocation
• production planning
• agriculture
• integrated sizing and planning
• vegetable farming system design
• perishable products

Acknowledgments

This work has been developed as part of a research project led by the laboratory G-SCOP and the French farmer and gardener company Les Fermes de Gally.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Nicolas Brulard http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3231-9596

Notes

1. We do not consider here products picked before maturity to finish ripening during long-distance travel and long-term storage, e.g. bananas or tomatoes. For instance, Ahumada and Rene Villalobos (2011b) modelled post-harvest ripening of tomatoes to sell to wholesalers. We do not consider either products packaged under controlled and modified atmosphere. We focused on fresh products picked at maturity to target high-quality proximity markets.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by French Association for Research and Technology (Association Nationale pour la Recherche et la Technologie).