Risk, labour and climatic uncertainty in crop rotation optimization
Résumé
The goal of this article is to give some guidelines when modeling farmers’ rotation choices
through optimization models. To improve the accuracy of such models, researchers can i)
sophisticate the utility function or ii) specify the production function and the constraints of the
model. Based on an interactive approach involving farmers, a preliminary discrete determinist
model is built and tested under changing crops prices. Then, two discrete stochastic modeling
approaches are compared; in the first one, yield risk is accounted as main source of income
variability and, in the second one, risk is incorporated as a stochastic constraint of monthly
inaccessible field days. Results show that risk aversion little affects rotation choice. A
stochastic labour constraint accounting for field inaccessibility has considerable more impact
on crops choice, especially in presence of imperfect labour market.