Track: Production Planning and Control

Abstract

In Japan, the problems of farming workforce ageing as well as lacking successors are getting serious rapidly. If this trend continues, the number of farmers is expected to decline further, Japanese agriculture itself is facing a great crisis. In order to alleviate these problems, make farmers realize stable management by securing profit is necessary.

In particular, it is rather difficult for small and medium-scale farmers or small and medium-sized enterprises, who are mainly engaged in open-field cultivation such as fruit trees, to secure a stable income. Because they should bear large costs of purchasing and maintaining farm machinery and equipment, as well as the labor cost of harvesting during the harvesting season, under an uncertain cultivation environment that is highly dependent on the weather. In this study, we propose a system of cultivation resource sharing and develop optimal cultivation plans based on resource sharing plans. The effectiveness and applicability of the system to improve farmers' profitability are also examined by numerical experiments.