Using Fuzzy Goal Programming for Long Range Production Planning in Agricultural Systems

The purpose of this paper is to present how the fuzzy goal programming (FGP) in the area of mathematical programming (MP) can be efficiently used for modeling and solving agricultural planning problems to achieve the target levels of production of various crops cultivated in different seasons in a year and make the profit by allocating the cultivable land properly and utilising the available productive resources carefully throughout the planning year. Mathematical programming (MP) models to agricultural planning systems have been widely used since Heady (1954) demonstrated the use of linear programming (LP) for land allocation to crop planning problems. From mid-1960s to 1980s, LP approach to different agricultural planning problems have been deeply studied by Beneke and Winterboer (1973), Dhawan and Kahlon (1977), Nix (1979), Black and Hlubik (1980) and widely circulated in the literature (France and Thornley, 1984). The potential use of LP to farming has been surveyed by Glen (1987). Although LP has been successfully implemented to farm problems, the limitation of LP is that of only optimizing (either maximizing or minimizing) a single objective problem subject to limited supply of productive resources. But the increasing demand of different types of agricultural products in society and involvement of a number of socio-economic goals to satisfy today’s most of the decision problems in agricultural systems are concerned with more than one objective, i.e., most of the farm problems are multiobjective in nature. In the multiobjective decision making (MODM) area, goal programming (GP) (Charnes and Cooper, 1961) has appeared as a robust tool for multiobjective decision analysis and widely applied to different decision problems. The application of GP approach to several real-life problems has been surveyed by Romero (1986). The GP approach to farm planning was first introduced by Wheeler and Russell (1977). Thereafter, GP and its variants have been widely implemented to different planning problems in farm sector by the pioneer researchers in this field [Dobbins and Mapp (1982), Dryzan (1985), Rehman and Romero (1987), Rodriguez-Ocaña et al. (1996), Gómez-Limón et al. (1996)]. The use of pre-emptive priority based GP to land use planning problems has also been demonstrated by Pal and Basu (1996).