Experience with mass audience linear programming for farm planning

In this article the authors discuss the structure and application of a farm planning model for commercial grain farms. The authors have personally helped over 4000 farmers improve their decision making process via use of this linear programming technique. This model is designed to help farmers make annual and longer run decisions on a grain producing farm. All discussion herein relates to the Purdue Automatic Cropping Budget Model B-9 which is used in conjunction with Purdue’s Top Farmer Workshops. This paper describes in technical terms, how the model is constructed and dicusses the purposes of its individual components.