Using improved climate forecasting in cash crop planning

Developments in meteorology over the last couple of decades have enabled significant improvements to be made in the accuracy of seasonal forecasts. This paper focuses on developing a model for cash crop planning that utilises these forecasts. It does this by determining the rate of growth of each crop as a function of heat units accumulated. This enables time to maturity to be determined and used in planning, particularly for planting new crops, removing unprofitable immature crops, and harvesting mature crops for profits. The proposed model is solved on a rolling horizon basis. To illustrate the advantage to be gained from improved seasonal forecasts the model is first applied to a problem using long-term temperature averages (climatology). Solutions to the same problem utilising improved seasonal forecasts for temperature are then obtained. This forecast proves to be a valuable input to the model and makes the second approach outperform the first consistently in our simulations.